AI will replace coders by 2040, warn academics
v3.co.uk
v3.co.uk
At least this kind of academia wont be replaced because their work is worthless, thus we have no interest into automating it.
If you discovered something amazing that takes one page to describe, why write a book about it? Even if it took 80 people in the team.
PS. exactly this kind of work (crappy paper) has been automated: http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/ ;-)
Machines writing code under human direction will only further improve our ability to explore the universe, enjoy life, and stream Netflix, especially if it saves us the trouble of learning how to make extremely heterogeneous systems work together.
You go ahead and stream Netflix, I think I'll write some more code.
Plus, that human direction is essentially what programmers do now.
On the ML front, little appears to be fundamentally new in the last two decades. Not sure how the ML classification craze is going to metastasize into full AI in the next two without some major new developments. ‘Academic certainty’ isn’t going to do it.
I'm not just being coy: as long as there are computers generating code, there will be a need for people to tell those computers what to generate. Those people will be coders, whatever they are called at the time.
The key ability of a good developer is finding out and understanding what needs to be done, the translation form the language of business to the language of technology. Technology has moved from low-level register juggling of 1950s to modern high-level, more and more declarative languages and frameworks. But the need to be able to map the informal requirements of business to it did not go away, and likely will not for quite some time.
After all, if AI could code like a human, even the best of us make mistakes and without that avenue of teaching them to be better, by auditing and reviewing existing code, we will only create more problems than we solve.
For many others, intelligent compiler reports would be their first wish.
I definitely agree that coding will look different after AI has permeated most of our information systems, but fully automated coding by 2040? Really? I honestly only see mundane boilerplate type of coding tasks being automated -- though arguably that is probably what a large majority of software developers are currently doing.
We’ll just have much more technological power in the future.
As the capacity increases so does the complexity.
Seriously though, if this happens, the repercussions might be far greater than coders having been replaced by (I'd assume self-improving) AI.
What would the software programming equivalent look like?
Get real. This is just futurology. Knowingly deceptive article trying to set what people talk about.