In the end, the only remaining jobs will be those that require interacting with other humans.
What current jobs don't require interaction with other humans?
Will humans write code in 2040?
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#42I think Humans will be writing code 40 years from now but not as they do today as natural language processing will get far enough that you could tell an AI what you require and then it will write the code for you. When a tech advances the number of its users increases but the % that understand its internals drop. Programming is no special flake to be protected from it the same will happen to it. We are already gettin…
Citation needed. Decades ago human level AI was coming real soon now and cobol would let managers write code without needing programmers.
Are you specifically asserting that the need to write code will be obviated by human or greater AI? This seems to be a safe prediction in the long run although I cannot imagine how we could accurately establish a time line.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#43Turns out, machines already do write most or really all of the “code” and we use higher level more human-like languages to tell magic programs what code to generate. Those magic programs are called compilers and interpreters, and they already do a lot to protect humans from the extreme heterogeneity of hardware.
There has been research going back to the very early stages of ML to apply it to compiler heuristics. For example, applying decision trees to loop unrolling.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#44I mostly get downvoted for questioning the AI hype, but I never tried it here in HN. The paper is... how I put it mildly... not in the realm of making sense. They mention simple question answering (which still stumbles at more complex even if structured questions), then code generators that existed since 1980s (at least) and then pretend that it's the same. Today's AI is about approximating human judgment from datase…
Echoing the ideas of PLDI 2016's keynote speaker:
Consider a problem like finding potential solutions to an equation. The way that AI today would solve this problem is to give you an algorithm that tells you "yes there's a solution", or "no there isn't," maybe with a somewhat-bogus quantification of confidence. An SMT solver would instead tell you "yes, here's a satisfying assignment", "no, there's no satisfying assignment", or "I don't know." In other words, existing PL techniques can guarantee that they'll never give you the wrong answer, while all of the guarantees in AI are only probabilistic.
At the same time, though, we've been able to make--and deploy on production codebases--significant improvements in compilers. Production software exists to automatically tune BLAS or FFT routines to your particular machine. We can automatically find bugs and generate evil testcases with concolic execution and whitebox fuzz testing. We're nearing the point where a compiler could superoptimize an innermost loop and develop faster--and provably correct--code than a human writing assembly by hand (it's already possible for small loops). Compilers and related tooling are already amazing tools in their power, and we've done stuff that's in many ways as or more impressive than AI, and yet our achievements are largely ignored outside our own small community.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#45Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#46I mostly get downvoted for questioning the AI hype, but I never tried it here in HN. The paper is... how I put it mildly... not in the realm of making sense. They mention simple question answering (which still stumbles at more complex even if structured questions), then code generators that existed since 1980s (at least) and then pretend that it's the same. Today's AI is about approximating human judgment from datase…
Echoing the ideas of PLDI 2016's keynote speaker: Consider a problem like finding potential solutions to an equation. The way that AI today would solve this problem is to give you an algorithm that tells you "yes there's a solution", or "no there isn't," maybe with a somewhat-bogus quantification of confidence. An SMT solver would instead tell you "yes, here's a satisfying assignment", "no, there's no satisfying assi…
In each case that you have mentioned, the algorithms have been coded by humans. The machine is only following orders it has been given.
There have been some examples of machine processes that have come up with new information, but you will find that all the base work is human.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#47In the end, the only remaining jobs will be those that require interacting with other humans.
Those who fix the PEBCAKs
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#48That AI would ask the client / designer "what the hell do you mean with this?" until an implementable design emerges. Client / designer decides it's much more efficient to throw a half baked idea over the fence to blame a human programmer afterwards.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
its hard to say how fast progress will continue, but I do think by that time we will need substantially less than today, maybe 10% of the work force we have now. 23 years ago it would have took a team many years to do what a single person can put out in a weekend. I dont think AI will be the single biggest driver though, mostly APIs getting more sophisticated. we (those that work in tech) have been lucky that the mor…
>23 years ago it would have took a team many years to do what a single person can put out in a weekend Are you sure? How big was the original Unix team? I suspect it's smaller than Microsoft's Windows team is these days. If anything, I think you have larger software teams now than ever before.
yes. you had to pick unix, because there is a lot that people simply do without building from scratch.
you can build an ecommerce site or something like pinterest in hours. gem install devise - and your login system is already up and running. you can get a 3d game up fairly quickly with unity. try building an interactive mapping application in 1994, seriously. try implementing a facebook like button in 1994 - you'll be like crap, no ajax, when I want to update the like count the entire page has to update. pages like that did do that, its unacceptable today.
projects back then accomplished way less, and were much less refined than the products we expect today. I also think a lot of teams are too large, there is a huge amount of bureaucracy at some companies.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#50The idea seems a bit outlandish, but I could easily see many coding jobs vanish. We wrote a performance-oriented library (a regex matcher) and invested huge numbers of person-hours tweaking and tuning and building new, faster subsystems. It's not a giant leap of faith to imagine a 'Gold' version (correct but not fast) being written by a human and most of the tuning/tweaking/test generation/etc being automated. I doub…
Sounds a lot like a compiler.
Hah. It's a fair cop.
That being said, the system I had in my mind was considerably more elaborate and extensive than you would expect from a compiler, except if your -O flags were numerically open-ended (-O99, anyone?).