Self-checkout at supermarkets does 90% of the work. The 10% of work remaining is done by a human supervising the self-checkout stations.
And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.
And same will happen to development. Lots of tasks will be automated and less people will be needed as a result.
As a side note, we were told decades ago that visual programming would similarly displace developers; however, I'm doing perfectly fine
It may not be true automation, but it's very effective, and it's something we're seeing not only at the grocery store. What used to involve calling a person up and asking for services is now done through web portals... taking a few minutes of the person's time.
The real issue in this degradation of customer service is usually not the time cost but the fact that, while it doesn't change the amount of random human error that occurs, it shifts the penalties onto the users... if your travel agent screws up, you get a refund... if you screw up (in something that used to be someone else's job) you're told to eat the costs.
Thing is, the replacement of a process when an ersatz alternative may not be "true automation" but it doesn't need to be in order to work. And job destruction across an industry isn't 0/1. There are still jobs in car factories in Detroit, just far fewer of them. There will still be jobs for truck drivers in 2040, but there probably won't be nearly as many. Employers will still need programmers; they might not need the same number of us. It only takes a dip of a few percent in job supply to cause wages and working conditions to crater (that's inelasticity), and even this says nothing about the ripple effects and systemic calamities (up to and including the possibility of economic depressions that last decades) that occur when large numbers of working people lose substantial income.
In some cases, shifting work to the customer is a net positive, especially if the customer can estimate their own time and effort better than they can estimate and manage someone else doing it. Nearly a half century after The Mythical Man Month, managing software development is still widely agreed to be an unsolved problem.
The cost of software development is not just the time and effort, but the existential risk to your own job or business from its unpredictability. This is why I do all of my own programming, and also most of my own home repairs... and use the self checkout at the supermarket.
It didn't displace developers because the industry has grown to absorb them. In my own case, I use my programs to get my own job done, then hand the whole thing over to the project team, and the developers write the production code that ends up in the product... but not at my expense.
I’ve also seen a superb one at Decathlon stores in Poland. You dump your items in a box. It automagically scans everything using something that I’m guessing is RFID based. Bag, swipe a card to pay, and goIt is much simpler to use and is actually pleasant. It’s one step short of just walking out of the store without actually checking out.
It is already happening. For example; setting up a production DB in primary-secondary mode; with daily back up and what not used to be quite a bit of manual grunt work. AWS Aurora and similar services handle 70-80% of the pain leaving you with setting up right table, index etc., Same in setting up a backend stack with DNS, load balancer etc.,
My guess is cloud services will automate even DB configuration. They have 100% visibility into the true production load pattern they will be able to suggest or even auto-configure things such as indexes.
That said, we will continue to have a need for dedicated dev-ops team. Just that instead of say 10 people team it'd require 2 person team. But you still need a person dedicated (maybe part time) baby-sitting infrastructure. Don't let every dev get their hands on infra.
The scenario in which demand for labor drops massively but human labor is still needed. Many industries would lose 80% of workers, but 20% would remain. Those 20% would be very high status and well paid, at least compared to the UBI neo-serf class that yheir former colleagues of the 80% have fallen off into. It is yhese 20% that woll form a new upper middle class. They will be isolated from the UBI serfs and live in gated communities.
These communities won’t be like the extremely luxurious communities of the one percent, but still isolated from the poor.
In another thread on this topic I’ve predicted a rise of technologically driven authoritarianism where the human elite uses AI to oppress the poor. The 20% that maintain such a system’s infrastructure (technical and otherwise) would probably support it politically. In most right wing authoritarian states the government has drawn support from its upper middle class. In left wing authoritarian states like the Soviet Onion there was a vast beurocrat class that was structurally isomorphic to the upper middle class.
I’m predicting that the humans that hold onto their jobs the longest, and work in high paying stem jobs, will form the core of such a regime. This is good news for many HN users, because you’ll be part of those 20%. I’m just worried what happens to the people that aren’t so lucky.
Of course there are caveats here that the automation may not happen soon, happen quickly or lead to societal upheaval or fascism, but all of those are still possible.
Take it a few more steps and then you get to automated analysis tools, system simulations, and NLP systems. This looks essentially like IronMan's Jarvis running heuristics interactively.
"Which edge cases did you cover?"
`I covered 3000 edge cases extrapolated from these bug reports...`
It may be that this training will need to get pushed to the education system (whatever that looks like by that point).
Additionally, there can be a mentorship model where the junior performs the first pass of reviews and iterations before presenting to the senior.
Think Star Trek: how does anyone learn to fly a spaceship? Lots of simulation and running smaller parts of the system in close observation... which isn't too different from now.