Will humans write code in 2040?
arxiv.org
Will humans write code in 2040?
1–10 of 50 posts
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#2In the end, the only remaining jobs will be those that require interacting with other humans.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#3I 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 datasets. The knowledge representation part, which is essential for tasks like coding, did not advance much since a decade ago.
This statement, however, takes the cake:
> Some early results from Facebook this year suggest that machines are capable of developing their own more efficient methods of communications
It's about the hype created by technically illiterate journos. (My TechCrunch piece on that: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/06/the-secret-language-of-cha...) Could the authors have done some minimal due diligence before making this kind of claims?
Re subject, if anything, coding today requires much higher level of abstract thinking. Of course, there are tools for coding oompah loompahs too, like WordPress, but there is a lot of human decisions to be made there, too.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#4I 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…
Agreed. I didn't finish the whole paper, but from what I read it sounded like the author didn't really understand what code generation was actually doing.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#5The 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 doubt that there is a simple AI approach to generate significant programs out of thin air, but I suspect a lot of the mechanical work of making programs fast/robust/small/whatever could be automated.
Sounds like a fun startup, honestly.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#6I 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…
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 more efficiently we do something, the more demand out there is for our skills, and there was a ton of pent up demand for tech.
I dont know if its the situation I am in, but I already feel like demand for programmers is starting to drop. many engineering jobs is moving data around. just a new type of database administrator
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#7There are already many layers of hardware/software that we don't have to code to use even going into the OSI layers stack. However the top most layer will always require programming and architecture because that is where innovation that matters to humans resides.
Even machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence, language processing and more all take some initial design and goals i.e. you have to train machine learning and architect what it is used for.
AI/automation/generation are currently great at reproduction but not inception/prototyping/creative aspects of development. There are areas that constantly move into automated layers though, where machine code is better. For instance, optimizations like WebAssembly are forming to solidify the application layers standards/platforms that may not need to be done by humans much longer, just as assembly wasn't used as much directly by programmers once C/C++/Objective-C came along in that wave in the 80s. When layers are standardized and automated, programmers just move up the stack to the new blue ocean of development built on top of everything else.
Similarly to AI, people have been saying visual coding will take over actual coding for a long time, same with automation/generation/AI. The automation still takes architecture, choreography, creativity and innovation to come up with something. Coding is automation once it is developed and live. Coding is part of the takeover and there will always be a top most layer that AI can't do for some time and possibly never on the creativity side for things that matter to a human or market need.
Programmers are also the first to really take advantage of AI. I am hoping for a future where small teams or individuals can build AI armies that code like they want on a massive scale. Here's to coding for your bot army that will do your bidding in the future and make a small team competitive always through the help of automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#8I 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…
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
That's an interesting aspect. I think the advances happened mostly in the areas of UI and intra-system communication. If it's about coding business logic for, say, supply chain or payroll system, the effort is roughly the same, despite bajillions invested in all the purple farts like BizTalk and new fancy functional language paradigms.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#9I 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…
I think it is not about AI but about improving our work with new tools. There are zillion developers doing the same thing everyday with the same mistakes and a lot of this work can be encapsulated at different abstraction levels.
Re: Will humans write code in 2040?
#10Nice counterexample to Betteridge's law.