Hacker News Reader

Comment by JustSomeNobody | Hacker News Reader

The youngins say AI will solve this. They're wrong.

A human-like AI will sure solve this - because the only way for "common man" to make software without developers is to have something to do the work of dealing with complexity - figuring out the precise details, handling edge cases in a way consistent with the original intent, etc.

But why wait for a powerful AI, if you can hire / enslave developers today?

> handling edge cases in a way consistent with the original intent, etc.

That's where we spend the majority of our time and always where things go horribly wrong in SciFi movies.

AGI will solve it. I think we've got a while yet before that becomes an issue for us devs though.

AGI sounds like fuzzy logic. We know how far that got. It will make some companies money though, it's snake oil. Computers even thousands of years from now will never be able to do what a programmer with 1 year of experience can do today, it's the advantage of being human.

Computers have less than a century of history so far and you're already able to predict the next thousands of years? Sounds like a religious belief to me.

> Computers have less than a century of history so far

That's actually the point.

I'm sorry, I don't see it. Can you explain how that short history somehow makes your sweeping claims about the future more credible?

At the end of 2014, nobody disagreed with this comic: http://xkcd.com/1425/

Halfway through 2016, "a programmer with 1 year of experience" using nothing by Python, numpy and a couple of spare weeks could roll their own convolutional neural net to identify images with high-90-percent accuracy.

I dunno about you but that sounds like a significant advance to me.

Would you play Russian Roulette with those odds? I wonder if an artificial intelligence would.

Ai is another thing that's always just around the corner, probably the same corner as graphical programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com