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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

As a junior developer, is it even worth pursuing an "standard" career in technology if line engineers will be replaced by some kind of deep learning algo in 10-15 years? What career is even safe if we get to that level? When I see events and the pace of progress, it's hard to even justify any long term planning and I feel that (American) society is completely unprepared for the impact automation will bring.

Might as well go for my masters now, given that no one with a BS degree will be needed long term? Given a long enough timescale, even that won't matter I guess...

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When they invented the COBOL compilers, the assembly language programmers were scared. "Now every business man can write their own code!".

Same when they invented the spreadsheet.

Same when they invented garbage collection.

Same with every new library, framework, "its just like legos"-invention.

Yes, they make it easier. But, the world then demands more software.

Sofware begets software.

Without compilers, there would be many many fewer programmers in the world.

Someday we might have the computer from the Enterprise. Then we can ask it "Give us the answer to the ultimate question about Life, the Universe, and Everything".

That's the way I see it. Programmers have been automating themselves out of menial tasks since the first compiler, or possibly even before.

What is considered "menial" depends on the context of the problem needing to be solved and a mix of your personal experience.

The increase of hardware performance also helped allow software abstractions to the ridiculous levels you see. That's what also makes it possible for computers to solve a greater array of business problems.

Engineers making tools that are used for making other tools, that are tools for other tools for other tools that eventually helped make someone's wedding photography site on Wix.

I wouldn't lose sleep over it. Deep Learning is great at making recommendations or classifications, given petabytes of data, but not even close to automatically solving general-purpose computing problems.

For example, I can type an error message into Google, and get sent to the solution, since thousands of others before me have provided the training data. But can I just describe my task to Google and have it produce the solution? Not even close.

As long as I get my food from humans in McDonalds I'm not too concerned about me being replaced by a robot. Society is lagging behind state of the art AI and robotics by decades.

That is literally two years or less away from today. Please look up momentum machines. They're beginning to hire people from the food industry and have stopped hiring people from the tech field vs a couple of years ago. It's getting close.

Yeah, they might open their first restaurant soon. How long will it take until this tech arrives in my city? You don't even need modern software or hardware for it. Basically it's finite automaton. It could have been developed 10 years ago, or even 15? And it will take another 15 years until I can eat reproducible burgers :)

Please look up Japan. They've had automated food machines for decades.

I feel like you're underestimating how big a deal creating a complete burger from scratch is. This isn't a partial squeeze out a patty, eject some condiments and then have a human assemble type of project. This is custom freshly ground meats, freshly chopped toppings and full assembly. This is difficult stuff for machines and it's nearly complete.

> creating a complete burger

I have a feeling that's a false safety. Automation doesn't have to replace 100% of the job. If you can automate even 50% of the job a big chunk of workforce is out.

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