Comment by astrofinch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrofinch | Hacker News Reader

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>Well first you were saying programmers may hesitate to create an AI singularity because it may cost them their job.

The line about programmers fearing automation only once it affects them was actually an attempt at a joke :P

The argument I'm trying to make is a simple inductive argument. Once something gets automated, it rarely to never gets un-automated. More and more things are getting automated/solved, including things people said would never be automated/solved. What's to prevent programming, including AI programming, from eventually being affected by this trend?

The argument I laid out is not meant to make a point about wait times, only feasibility. It's clear people aren't good at predicting wait times--again, Go wasn't scheduled to be won by computers for another 10+ years.

The fact that programming is an exceptionally ill-defined task. Computers are great at doing well-specified tasks. In many ways, programming is the act of taking something poorly-specified and making it specific enough for a computer to do. Go, while hard, remains very well defined.

I hope for more automation in CS. It will help eliminate the boilerplate and let programmers focusnin the important tasks.

> In many ways, programming is the act of taking something poorly-specified and making it specific enough for a computer to do.

Software development in the broad sense is that, sure; not sure I'd say programming is that -- taking vague goals and applying a body of analytical and social skills to gather information and turn it into something clearly specified and unambiguously testable is the requirements gathering and specification area of system analysis, which is certainly an important part of software development, but a distinct skill from programming (though, given the preference for a lack of functional distinctions -- at least strict ones -- within software development teams in many modern methodologies, its often a skill needed by the same people that need programming skills.)

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