AI Will Not Be Taking Away Code Jobs Anytime Soon

Post by hoopladler » Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

anonacct37 wrote: post #17

hoopladler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing reportedly believed that programming would require “a great number of mathematicians of ability”. I think if you want to find a trend in computing, it's the same as the progression in other industries. Tooling replaces raw ability, technique replaces skill, and jobs requiring skills are slowly replaced by jobs that don't require skills. Consider Go, for instance. There's no doubt that the opinionated, overly-c…

> designed so that a mediocre programmer can produce passable code That's a little unfair, if accurate. Even the best of us are mediocre programmers when fixing a bug in the middle of the night or diving into a new code base. You might as well say (and some do) that Haskell is for mediocre programmers because good programmers don't make type mistakes. > a compiler that tells them off for not properly commenting their…

Post by closeparen » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

ericmcer wrote: post #16

dynamodispatch wrote: post #9

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> No AI can decide _what_ to build Honestly, programmers don't decide either. We build what we are told to build. > Could it be made better? Of course! Most of it is terrible. There's an infinite amount of work to be done. Of course, if our objective it to achieve perfection, then there will always be more things to do because we can never achieve perfection. But most of the time "good enough" is good enough. But I a…

Judging by how impacted CS programs are at colleges, and how hard working the interns I have been seeing come through my company lately, wages may be stalling sooner than you think. Like many other skilled occupations in this country the future is probably going to be very highly paid elite workers and masses of low paid people who are just "good". Kind of inevitable in a capitalist society where human labor is losin…

Post by kthejoker2 » Mon, Feb 12, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #14

klibertp wrote: post #4

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I don't believe this to be true. We've seen quite a few technologies, which promised to "let anyone code", without any real success, whereas to "let AI code" is even harder than letting your boss. At the very least, I expect we'd need another 2 or 3 major, paradigm-shifting, breakthroughs to get computers sophisticated enough to program themselves, which is still 50-60 years away. I mean, that's my gut feeling; we'll…

I think that we can do a lot more with a lot less programmer hours today. React native is a good example. We have just finished rebuilding our app with maybe one third the time and cost of our two native apps. This is of course offset by the overall huge growth in demand for all kinds of software. But if that demand curve ever flattens out, then I think we could definitely see a reduction in the need for programmers.