1 in 3 Developers Fear AI Will Replace Them (computerworld.com) 337
dcblogs writes: Evans Data Corp., in a survey of 550 software developers, asked them about the most worrisome thing in their careers. A plurality, 29%, chose this answer: "I and my development efforts are replaced by artificial intelligence." Surprisingly, this concern about A.I. topped the second-most identified worry, which was that the platform the developer is working on will become obsolete (23%), or doesn't catch on (14%). Concerns about A.I. replacing software developers has academic support. A study by Oxford University, The Future of Employment, warned that the work of software engineers may soon become computerized. Machine learning advances allow design choices that can be optimized by algorithms. According to Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, the thought of obsolescence due to A.I., "was also more threatening than becoming old without a pension, being stifled at work by bad management, or by seeing their skills and tools become irrelevant."
really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are worried about AI replacing you, you must be doing something very routine, not requiring anything new or creative.
Re:really? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are worried about AI replacing you, you must be doing something very routine, not requiring anything new or creative.
That very often describes web programmers. A designer designs a website in Photoshop, then hands off the elements to the programmer to be implemented in CSS/HTML. There is no reason that couldn't happen automatically.
Adding API calls and dynamic elements makes it somewhat harder, but still....
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Have you ever seen the layers of a website design? 90% of the job is finding out how to decode the graphic designer's mess to be able to output different off/on/hovering states while at the same time making sprites, etc. It's far from a one-step job.
Re:really? (Score:5, Funny)
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They make those complicated web sites with too many scripts as a way to prove that their jobs are important. Job security rather than providing what the customer needs.
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There is no reason that couldn't happen automatically.
Hasn't that literally been done thousands of times? Remember Pagecloud [youtube.com]?
Static HTML generators.... I imagine eventually any mass-market hosting provider left will have one.
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Re:really? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, and Dreamweaver is still a thing, but the WYSIWYG isn't that great.
I started my technical career in the late 1990's by debugging the HTML output from Dreamweaver. Whenever the designers tried to implement a complicated table (a new feature back then), I had to wade through all the extraneous text to fix the problem that caused the table to go visually FUBAR. I got no respect because I was the QA intern.
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But they haven't, it still sucks, and you still get no respect.
Things have gotten better but I never stayed in web dev after my six-month internship. I went on do video game testing, help desk and desktop support, PC refresh projects, building out a data center, and computer security over the last 20 years. I don't have to worry about an AI replacing me since I'll probably be doing something else that doesn't require an AI yet.
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Things have gotten better but I never stayed in web dev after my six-month internship.
Nope. Check out CSS Flexbox. We're still laying things out with tables, but now we have more layers of cruft inbetween.
Re:really? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that explains why most sites are crap. You get someone who is experienced in making things look good to "design" the site when you need someone who knows about information architecture to design the site. Then you bring in the person with Photoshop to make it look pretty.
I've read the previous edition to Information Architecture For the Web and Beyond (this is the 4th) and it's a great book. http://shop.oreilly.com/produc... [oreilly.com] I really wish more designers would read it because making a site is more than just putting a menu up top and some common options like Contact Us down in the footer with the content in the middle.
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tbh I think websites have gotten dumber in the last five years, so we're kind of regressing.
More should be worried ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing the crop of programmers back in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's to programmers nowadays, and the type of code that they have produced, more of the current-day programmers should be worrying about being supplanted by AI
Back then (1960's to 1980's) most of those who were doing programming tried all kinds of ways to sharpen their coding skills, and their efforts were not wasted
Despite not having all the tools / toys that the current crop of programmers get, programmers of yore produce codes which were far better than what we have right now
The chief problem with current crop of programmers is that they treat programming as a way to earn a living, while programmers of yours treat what they do as their passion
Without the 'passion' factor the codes produced today are not much different from what AI can produce - and in fact, in some cases AI are producing better codes than their human counterparts
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I can say that. Look at the quality and type of code made in the past few years, compared to what was done with far more limited tools before that. You don't really see capable tools being made these days on the GPL front, as the allure for making it big with yet another clone of an app on a store seems to take the devs there.
If you compare Katello, Foreman, Docker, and Openstack to tools made before that, the code quality is just laughable. Openstack has had years and lots of money thrown at it, and yet
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A fleshlight app? Link or it doesn't exist.
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I'm pretty sure that is copypasta from another thread. The 'fleshlight' typo kind of gives it away.
Re:More should be worried ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Today's programmers should be worried about being replaced by the 20-somethings, just like when they were 20-something, they did the same to the 40-year-old "codgers."
If you're over 30, you're far more likely to be replaced in the next 5-10 years by some wet-behind-the-ears punk than by a robot. And if you're in your 40s and still coding, the market says you're well past your "best before" date.
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As you get older, you have to specialize and eke out your own niche. Otherwise, you are competing with the 20-somethings on their turf and they will win everytime because their tats and ironic beards are cooler than yours. You can still make it in the 40s and coding, mainly because you see all the tomfoolery other people have done, have learned how to write code properly when they actually taught proper code design in college (versus coding in whatever language was in fashion), and can fix other people's
Re:More should be worried ! (Score:5, Funny)
"You can still make it in the 40s and coding"
I have known occasional devs who have done this, using subterfuges like surreptitiously moving open-office partitions so that nobody else sees them directly and getting missed in layoffs. They have confederates, generally the late-twenties types who are already running scared, bring them water bottles and vending machine food and carry away 'honey buckets'. By night, a paper-towel sponge bath in the restroom with the broken security cam and they're good.
I knew one C# developer who held out until age 44, when he revealed himself with an inopportune sneeze during a VIP tour of the office. I remember the HR goons hauling him off, white beard trailing on the floor, babbling something about 'Fortran' and 'core dumps.' He was able to snag an interview in Computerworld, which was still printed on paper back then, titled something to the effect of "World's Oldest Programmer."
Re:More should be worried ! (Score:5, Insightful)
They should worry about being replaced by Deepak on an HB-1 visa.
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What I've found is not that I get replaced by 20 somethings, but that I end up with 20 somethings as my boss or director (no twenty something VP yet but I'm sure I'll have one of those before I am put into archive storage).
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If you're over 30, you're far more likely to be replaced in the next 5-10 years by some wet-behind-the-ears punk than by a robot. And if you're in your 40s and still coding, the market says you're well past your "best before" date.
Bah.
I'm nearly 50, and if anything my marketability is growing faster than at any time in my career.
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I also see the embedded world getting a bit sloppy at times. Memory is getting cheaper so efficiency isn't a high concern and bloatware starts to creep back in. The IoT fad has the benefit of also requiring very very low power so that's shaking up the complacency again, but in another decade it might not matter.
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If you're over 30, you're far more likely to be replaced in the next 5-10 years by some wet-behind-the-ears punk
*snip*
And, to get to my point: it is very often the older, more mature developers and sysadmins that have the deeper understanding you need when things are not as straightforward as managers feel they ought to be. Some companies are beginning to realise that.
Agreed. I've been developing software for almost 30 years and I'm not worried about being out of work. Experience counts. These days I typically lead agile dev teams and, while I do cut my share of the code, a lot of my role is driving the overall solution design in the right direction. A lot of the 20-somethings I see are competent coders but they are not good at visualising the overall system and thinking about things like resilience, high performance, latency, etc.
Of course, as others have noted, hav
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Of course. It was the fashion in my day.
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Indeed. But more importantly, if the AI wants to do my work for me, I'm going let it; I'll simply go on vacation.
Re:really? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Adds from IBM illustrate: its already reality, investing, harvesting and research data, make an medical analysis, find the best defense strategy for a trial: is all AI dominated already.
Seriously, company that bets big on AI says it's everywhere and you take their marketing department as a credible source? Don't get me wrong but AI is barely scratching the surface of being a tool the way machinery was for the production industry, if you think AI is going to replace doctors, lawyers and generals any time soon you're wildly delusional. I'm not so sure about teachers though, since they keep repeating the same curriculum over and over and are more of a "processing" industry of sorts than a cre
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Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it could eventually be possible to build an AI capable of automating my job. But I think 90%+ of the human population would be out of a job first.
The problem is that it doesn't have to replace you 100% in order to decimate the job market. Smart tools that automate 2/3rds of what you do would mean mass layoffs across the industry.
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1 in 3 AIs fear being replaced by Humans.
What the hell is wrong with that? (Score:2)
Christ, the stuff that gets modded up on
Re:What the hell is wrong with that? (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. And here we reach the the limits of Capitalism to distribute the wealth to the population. At the same time Capitalism depends critically on people being able to buy things, hence wealth must continue to be distributed to the population or things collapse. It is no accident that an unconditional basic income for everybody is seriously being discussed now in some countries and it is not idealists with their heads in the clouds that drive this discussion. (They are routinely trying to hijack it though, which somewhat obscures that this is about a critically important problem).
The main problem today seems to be one of irrational envy: For example most ( > 80%) people in Switzerland say they would continue working with an unconditional basic income, even if that allows them to live reasonably well already. The problem is that most people think that not so may of their fellow citizens would do so. Still, long-term, there really is no alternative to it if we want to keep civilization going.
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Still, long-term, there really is no alternative to it if we want to keep civilization going.
Alternative: make fewer people.
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And that helps how?
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Spoken like a true inhumane fascist. Incidentally, that does not work either, who would your slaves be?
Re: really? (Score:2)
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And working on a platform where efficiency or performance don't really matter much.
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I would see AI programming as being very similar to model based programming. It can figure out how to t
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I designed an AI primitive capable of intuitive self reflection 35 years ago and its nodes could run in 64k. It's been fleshed out with over 12000 builds into an open source studio requiring 500Mb of ram per node, but that doesn't mean the basic algorithm can't be loaded securely into IoT devices. The problem is no one is in charge to say how this or that platform should be developed. Nevertheless I've mapped out over 1000 years of future development requiring only that AI fed by human opinions be used to r
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I've seen you post before. You're a fucking lunatic - and I mean that in a good way. I seem to recall that the last time you wrote (that I noticed) you lamented having to write it all anew sometime in the 80s or early 90s and were thinking that you might have to do it again but didn't have enough time left on the planet to do so. You need an apostle to hand it off to when you're dead and gone. The world thrives on lunatics.
Re: H-1Bs... (Score:3)
Bring on our intelligent replacments (Score:5, Insightful)
I try desperately each and every day to make myself redundant through writing better software... but, alas, it has yet to happen.
no fear (Score:3)
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You should stop calling him Al. Albert is much more respectful.
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Friendly? I'm a jerk; does that mean I get replaced soon?
No, but you may get transferred over to the help desk :)
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Al Bundy? (Score:4, Funny)
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Al Cohol.
model generated code (Score:3, Insightful)
Colour me sceptical. We haven't even successfully entered the technology level where systems are developed using *solely* high-level modeling languages (UML, state diagrams, Simulink, Modellica, etc) and produce production code for the whole system (not just parts that are then glued together by humans with special code), and now you want to replace everything with AI (whatever that means)? Even for established code, show me a fully functioning tool for suggesting automated bug fixes when the program crashes or has a race condition.
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I am skeptical as well. For something common, asking an AI to code a word processor wouldn't be difficult. However, that isn't something that would be useful or bring in cash. What would be useful are things that are pushing the edge that an AI may not be able to think about.
For example, a deduplicating program similar to obnam, bup, attic, borgbackup, or zbackup that instead of storing its repository as tons of tiny files, stores the deduplicated stuff as either a large single file, or a number of mediu
Re:model generated code (Score:5, Interesting)
AI taking over my job as a Software Engineer is the -last- thing I'm worried about. The developers who are afraid of such a thing must have no idea about AI.
Developing complex programs in the -last- thing an AI will be able to do. They will be able to have conversations, walk, drive, bring your kids to school and pretty much do everything else before being able to write a typical, high complexity software program.
If that point is ever reached it means we have reached the "singularity" wherein an AI is able to program a better version of itself, exponentially increasing its own intelligence.
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Hahahha, think of what an actually working hypothetical AI would conclude in this situation: The customer/user is a moron and has no clue! That will drive AI adoption like crazy! (If it ever happens at all....)
compilers, too! (Score:2)
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Yet you want to give them assemblers, likely full featured macro assemblers.
Just give them a hex editor and a hard copy of the CPU instruction set and tech manual.
I know, luxury, let them copy con: program.exe and use alt-keypad to enter op codes and data, like a Klingon coder.
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You probably want them to have a keyboard. All they really need is a keypad with two keys: 0 and 1. If they were really good programmers they could just use a switch like a telegraph operator to input code based on timing. Press down for a 1 and nothing for a 0. The better the programmer the faster they set the timing.
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You probably want them to have a keyboard. All they really need is a keypad with two keys: 0 and 1. If they were really good programmers they could just use a switch like a telegraph operator to input code based on timing. Press down for a 1 and nothing for a 0. The better the programmer the faster they set the timing.
Pfffft. You kids and your "programming languages".
Old-school guys like me used to take a magnetized needle and just tap the spots on the floppy disk where we wanted the ones and zeros. One time we ran out of needles and had to write a program using only zeroes.
At risk of pedantry... (Score:4, Insightful)
In other pedantry, isn't 'seeing your skills and tools become irrelevant' an apt description of what would happen if an AI started doing your job?
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Social Security is a pension... and one many people think won't be there in 30 years. So there's that....
Well it's bound to happen to some degree. (Score:2)
But arguably that could cause salaries to rise as well, as programmers become more productive more software will be demanded.
Let's imagine that programmers become twice as productive. The simplistic way of looking at things is that half the programmers will have to lose their jobs. But imagine you had a programming project that would be worth $750K to you if it were done, but will cost you a cool million to finish. That project is currently creating zero programming jobs. But in our programmers-are-twice-a
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That line of reasoning is full of crap. It doesn't take 100,000 times more programmers to produce a program uses 100,000,000 people than it does for 1,000. Most software is already "good enough." Much of it has been tinkered to death (firefox is a good example).
How many more word processors, spreadsheets, operating systems, social media platforms, and web browsers do we need anyway? People tend to use what other people are using. Cost is secondary (otherwise people would be running free platforms exclusive
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Really, your response is full of straw men it's hard to respond to, so I'll limit myself to just this point: you seem to be under the impression that we have all the kinds of software we'll ever need already; in which case you're right: it doesn't matter if our jobs are taken by AI's; there's no more work.
I guess time will tell which of us is right, but I think the idea that all the kinds of software we need have already been invented could only be true if we've already imagined all the way there are to pro
1 in 3 developers fear AI will replace them (Score:5, Funny)
and the other 2 who have actual experience with AI and know how shitty it still is, laugh at him
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[A]nd the other 2 who have actual experience with AI and know how shitty it still is, laugh at him[.]
Bingo. Artificial intelligence of the modern age is an absurd oxymoron. Give it another couple hundred years or so, and it *might* be able to design and write programs as well as an 8 year-old child.
The people afraid of A.I. usurping their programming jobs must be absolute wretched at their jobs.
Statistics don't lie but liars use statistics (Score:2)
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1/sqrt(3*4) = 28.9% which puts 29% a titch closer to 1/3 by the harmonic mean.
Measure twice. Cut once.
Not Outsourcing? (Score:2)
It seems to me being outsourced/offshored would be a much bigger and more immediate worry. I've already lost my job to visa workers before.
It's a 100% certainty that it already happened from my perspective, while AI replacing devs is pie-in-the-sky Jetson stuff.
Existing AI is pretty good at making savants, but lacks common sense, office politics skills, and the ability to deal with unexpected situations.
It's like fearing meteors more than climate change.
2 in 3 Developers (Score:3)
I think they might be right (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things that has always kept me away from development and more on the systems side has been the overwhelming evidence that the job category is shrinking. Some aspects of development, such as developing in the Web Framework of the Moment, are very abstract from the actual operations performed, and are mostly gluing together libraries and API calls. It's amazing how little many developers have to do to get something to work. Phone apps are another example -- huge SDKs do almost everything for the developer; they just have to signal intent.
The thing that's complex, and that requires talent, is writing all of those frameworks, libraries, APIs and abstractions. Knowing how the full stack of a system works and what is actually happening is a very useful skill. This is why embedded developers are generally not low-level guys -- those libraries and other niceties don't fit into the tiny CPU and RAM constraints on many devices.
Then again, who knows -- cloud is killing a lot of the expert-level systems jobs as well. I've been very careful to stay a generalist, but I know lots of my colleagues who spent enormous amounts of effort learning things like Cisco networking, various VM hypervisors and SAN storage inside and out, front and back, and the cloud is slowly eating away at all of that. The days of being an EMC genius, or Exchange guru, and making massive amounts of money are numbered unfortunately -- we're experiencing similar salary reductions due to commoditization that developers are facing because of H-1Bs and other factors.
What are those developers developing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us who get paid well, get paid well because we can take vague, poorly written specs, figure out the real world business requirements and fill in all the missing parts. Somehow I don't see AI figuring out what a human means in a particular business context any time soon. btw. If you do write perfect specs, you've essentially written the program. The hard work (the valuable work) is done. Picking good design patterns and coding it up is easy.
I hate the term AI. There is no intelligence in it. "AI" programs are still computer programs that execute the series of steps it was told to execute. In certain cases they seem smart because they have been trained on a huge set of scenarios (You are quickly programming the program with the massive data set and associated "answers" instead of hand coding X million cases.). These "intelligent" programs still fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out" just like any dumb computer program.
Re: What are those developers developing? (Score:2)
The thing you're missing is that, if someone automates the specs-to-code part, the end users can do the "figure out the real world business requirements" all by themselves, and only pay for the software platform, cutting out the middleman.
It worked for processes that can be represented as Excel spreadsheets, you only need to bu
Brave new world of FUD (Score:2)
AI isn't advanced enough for this to even begin to be a worry. Even after someone successfully develops the world's first viable AI it will be so astronomically expensive there'll only be one or two in the world.
Smart people are over-reacting, and the media is loving it. That's all you're seeing here.
Remember "The Last One?" (Score:3)
A program for the Apple ][ that was, IIRC, advertised as "All the programs you will ever need, for just $595?" I believe it was an interview-driven database-query generator or something like that. Wikipedia points me to [wikipedia.org] this review in Byte [google.com]. In reality most reviews of the program were lukewarm.
Good thing technology never advanced... (Score:2)
What a joke (Score:2)
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I'm going to send my car over to your house to pick you up and drive you here, so that we can discuss the "No true Scotsman" fallacy over coffee. :)
Wtf? (Score:2)
AI doesn't mean the 3 laws of robotics. It means incredibly complex if statements that are programmatically built (so called "machine learning"). It's not going to replace
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Early on in the internet, I was (sadly) consumed with the idea that since html and vbscript (sorry) were both just text, which could create other text, then it ought to be possible to create a program which would create other programs, test and apply the results. I was the AI researcher you picture, except with few resources, not much ambition and no pants.
The real problem I faced with designing such a system was motivation. Not motivation for me, motivation for the resulting project. I was content to consi
Re:Wtf? (Score:5, Interesting)
2011 Sandy Bridge and 2015 Sky Lake are within 10% performance wise. That's what 2.5% per year? Would you still stand by your " _massively_increasing_ " Statement? Intel realized that CPUs were fast enough. Nobody is maxing out their CPU running day to day OS tasks anymore. They mostly sit idle, underclocked to save power and heat, only spinning up to full "turbo" power for brief spikes when loading a web page or a new program. Intel has famously been using these die shrinks not to improve computing power (what would consumers use it for??) but to improve thermal performance and more importantly battery life, as they fight for their lives in the mobile devices space.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
A bit of faulty reasoning (Score:2)
According to Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, the thought of obsolescence due to A.I., "was also more threatening than becoming old without a pension, being stifled at work by bad management, or by seeing their skills and tools become irrelevant."
That's because everyone already is confronting becoming old without a pension, being stifled at work by bad management, seeing their skills and tools become irrelevant, being off-shored/out-sourced, being seen as too old when they have decades to go before becoming a senior, mass layoffs, mergers that entail "synergies" that really mean RIFs, economic crashes, jobless recoveries, divorce, kids, crime and terr'rism, racism, the collapsing safety net, being bankrupted by health problems despite having insuran
Statistics show that... (Score:2)
The struggle is real (Score:2)
The way I figure it is, the more able you are to believe an AI will replace a programmer, the more likely it is that you are going to be the one replaced first.
Conclusion (Score:2)
Fear not. AI's a lie. (Score:2)
Developer vs. programmer (Score:4, Insightful)
tl;dr: Creative developers are not likely to be replaced by AI.
The terms are blurred. Most people considering themselves developers actually are application programmers. Quite a few exceptional people in CS call themselves or are being classified as programmers. Apparently the almost meek title "programmer" covers more of what those people do than something like "developer".
But in the world of us mortals the title "programmer" is not taken seriously. We need to take recourse in titles like "application programmer", "web designer", "senior developer", "solution architect", "enterprise architect" and so on. But let's be brutally honest; Most of us will never make it into Wikipedia's list of programmers [wikipedia.org].
At any rate a developer can take an idea, a hunch or a vague concept and create a computing world around it. It requires huge amounts of insight and experience to come up with something simple that solves many business problems elegantly and which is accepted as a business proposition. As of yet I don't see such creative processes being replaced by AI. A machine that wins at chess or at go does so by recognizing patterns in a limited domain or by brute force but not by being particularly intelligent at identifying a problem in need of a solution. The contexts of go, chess and even navigation through traffic are huge but still extremely confined.
However, if your work consists in taking requirements and producing code than expect to be surprised.
language compiler was early AI (Score:3)
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Forcing people to buy insurance isn't socialized healthcare. Yes many millions more people have insurance that they wouldn't have had before but there are still way too many people without healthcare in the US to be saying that the ACA is successful.
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Indeed. The only alternative is the collapse of Capitalism (because people will not be able to buy enough things) and we have no replacement for Capitalism at this time. And it needs to be at least a step up from the absolute minimum needed to survive for the same reason. It will be a long and slow process though, because many people just cannot stand that somebody else gets anything for free.
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Sorry, Bum-A-Matic 9000(tm) already does that*.
* Urinating in stairwell feature is $200 extra.
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To say nothing of the % of effort that starts going into 'communication and management' as project headcounts go up.
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While I agree that most developers _are_ incompetent, what we have in AI these days is a lot worse.
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I'd disagree, but apparently 1 in 3 developers are morons...
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This is that state-of-the-art. And there actually is nothing on the horizon that could do any better. Hence the threat of AI is mostly to people doing jobs that are on the same level. Anybody actually reasonably good at problem solving will not be replaced by AI anytime soon and possibly not ever.
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If the job could fit a template then you wouldn't need AI to fix it. The point of using AI is to solve the non-standard cases.
That being said I don't see the good developers having anything to be worried about. They will just continue to move further away from the hardware and work in more abstract terms. Maybe we'll be able to just give specifications to the computer for what an object (class) will be and it will write all of the code behind the scenes picking the appropriate parent classes and storage fo