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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

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Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#31

Post by Houshalter »

tikhonj wrote: post #21
pedalpete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

I did a bit of research in program synthesis, which is probably the closest academic field to this sort of thing (albeit in the realm of programming languages rather than AI/ML). I have two main conclusions: • Current methods to generate programs fundamentally do not scale . Most practical research is about how to extend small-scale synthesis systems to large-scale problems, rather than synthesizing large programs ou…

Current program synthesis isn't that advanced. At least not compared to state of the art AI.

Recently AI has proved it can beat expert humans at all perfect information games. Go has a ridiculously huge search space, but by using neural networks AIs can learn to narrow it down to a manageable size.

Program synthesis is just like a perfect information game. You have a search space, a state, a set of goals, etc. You could theoretically make it into a board game, and have human experts challenge computers at it.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#32

Post by crpatino »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

We have been there before, yet we are still here.

The proportion of systems programmers that can writte assembly code consistently on par with the quality of that from a decent compiler (such as Gnu's GCC) is probably less than 1%, and they take orders of magnitude more time to do so. Yet, you do not observe system programmers dying out. They use C (and increasingly, C++, Dart, etc) to build bigger and more complex systems, with more demanding requirements.

Ditto for application developers. We now have this amazing enginees called DBMS, which handle out of the box a bunch of common requirements, and whose reign and management has spawned a new class of job that did not exist 30 years ago: DBAs. Some of those are glorified IT grunts, but many are not! They build (information) systems that are bigger and more complex than ever by translating business use cases into a description that is understandable by the DBMS engine.

I could keep going on and on: web frameworks, game engines, simulation models, etc, etc. The point is that the hard part about this craft is not to know how to make the machine compute some XYZ calculation, it is to understand that computing XYZ is an acceptable way to fullfil a business need within the limits of available resources (in the dimensions of development cost, runtime cost, infrastructure maintenance, etc).

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#34

Post by Aelinsaar »

byw wrote: post #30
pedalpete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O…

I used to think this way, but this assumes there's an upper limit to demand. I think as the capability of tools increase, so will user expectations in capabilities and coverage. Sure, programming will be more about asking the right questions than implementing solutions. We'd think that'll be easy, but most people have no idea what they want in life, and philosophy is still hard.

It sounds like programmers will be a very different kind of person, with very different skill sets in that reality.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#35

Post by coldcode »

There will be a day when the last programmer writes the last program. Long after we are all dead. While some types of jobs may be automatable, most of what I have to do makes little sense to smart people much less a rigid AI. What AI can take almost random requirements, strange UI designs and animations and clueless VP driven features and turn it into something people want to use.

I think the VP's are more likely to be replaced by an AI.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#36

Post by astazangasta »

tryitnow wrote: post #20
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

As someone else already pointed out we actually do have robots doing surgery. AIs are not dogs - that's a bad analogy. Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. A lot of businesses don't care so much about quality and craftsmanship - as long as their customers are stuck with them they're perfectly willing to ship the mos…

We have humans using a very fancy robot (DaVinci) to do surgery. So far no AI has been given the knife.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#37

Post by tikhonj »

Houshalter wrote: post #31
tikhonj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a bit of research in program synthesis, which is probably the closest academic field to this sort of thing (albeit in the realm of programming languages rather than AI/ML). I have two main conclusions: • Current methods to generate programs fundamentally do not scale . Most practical research is about how to extend small-scale synthesis systems to large-scale problems, rather than synthesizing large programs ou…

Current program synthesis isn't that advanced. At least not compared to state of the art AI. Recently AI has proved it can beat expert humans at all perfect information games. Go has a ridiculously huge search space, but by using neural networks AIs can learn to narrow it down to a manageable size. Program synthesis is just like a perfect information game. You have a search space, a state, a set of goals, etc. You co…

I think that measuring state spaces is really misleading. (Although we totally did that to aggrandize how good our synthesis system was, at least to ourselves :P. The space of possible programs, even short ones in a small language, quickly gets hilariously large.)

Past a certain point the structure of a space is what matters which dictates how well any given search strategy will perform, and that doesn't readily generalize across domains.

I have not seen anything that would lead me to believe that results like AlphaGo will meaningfully generalize to such an extent. I still think that it would take more than just incremental work to get from where we are now to scalable program synthesis.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#39

Post by astazangasta »

carapace wrote: post #7

If you have been following the recent advances in AI (and are not clueless) then it should be getting really REALLY obvious that most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years. AI will eat your career.

No. The main job of a programmer is understanding human requirements. Machines cannot do this; the job of getting a machine to understand human requirements IS programming.

Re: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence and the End of Code

#40

Post by origami777 »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #28

Amazing listening to all of the HN coder apologists here come up with excuses for why they aren't going to lose their jobs, too. If anything, abstraction, ever-tighter vendor lock-in, and improvements in static analysis will kill off many coder jobs. There aren't too many jobs out there for recreating basic UNIX tools like sed or grep -- soon, this will be true for higher level tools as well, until what you're doing…

I do some coding but not as a full time job. And I have to admit that when I think of AI replacing a coder's job it seems so far off. Maybe it's because I'm in the thick of it and can't see the forest for the trees.

When this comes up I often wonder what part is AI going to replace? Will it:

1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution?

2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest?

It seems more likely to me that the tooling for workers in this value chain will get more advanced. Some of that might include some computer intelligence that is able to perform some tasks on its own.

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