Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeshaman | Hacker News Reader

Here's a nice 2015 documentary about jobs in the high tech society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtSqlfZgnm4

And this is a qz article dealing with self-driving trucks which are poised to replace truck drivers:

http://qz.com/417014/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-th...

The map in there (also found here http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...) is interesting. Truck driver is currently the most common job in the majority of the U.S. states, but interestingly, 'software developer' is on the rise and has taken the top spot in a couple of states. This happened last year.

So the software developer seems to be the truck driver of the 21st century, which kind of makes sense , since we're not just driving trucks, we're 'driving' all the machines out there.

So it begs the question - if this is the fate of truck drivers, isn't the same going to happen to the software developers in a couple of years ?

View on HN

I think the difference between software dev and truck driving is that it doesn't actually require and extraordinary skill to drive a truck. You get your truck driving license, which is not hard (easy in some countries even) and that's it. For software dev you need a lot more ; most people simply cannot do it. The type of software dev that doesn't need those skills will be (and already are) obsolete; it just takes some time to mature and get to that point. But for truck drivers; with self driving trucks we need 0 truck drivers, with better processes, libraries and tools we need less programmers, but far from 0.

It requires extraordinary skill for a human - but for a computer? Computers will learn to think, imo you would be a fool to believe otherwise. At that point creating more software will simply be a matter of burning more coal/collecting more photons/harnessing more wind/fusing atoms/splitting atoms/exploiting temperature gradients/etc.

So what we are arguing over is when this will happen. I think we are getting quite close - decades away. Maybe less for simpler software development processes.

Most of us are going to live through interesting times, our children are going to live through very interesting times indeed - as the old Chinese curse goes...

source: Msc mathematics and have been following the bleeding edge of ML like a hawk, looking for a problem for the solutions

Yes, it will happen. I just don't think it's decades away. At least not in the sense of truck drivers; most programmers will go (like most lawyers, doctors, etc will) but there will be some skills required the coming decades which are still too hard (IMHO ofcourse). But yes, it will eventually happen for sure.

And for simpler processes it is already there but people would not call that programming here on HN and companies are not taking advantage of it. You really do not need custom software to run most companies (even a lot of software companies; just repackaging), but (luckily for me) they still order custom software and yes, it is more efficient and nicer; that is because they want software to match their process while it should be the other way around usually.

>> You really do not need custom software to run most companies

So why do they still use custom software ??

Doesn't this scare you a little bit ? Because it does scare me a lot.

As I get older I feel like there's a peak amount of knowledge that I can load into my mind and the areas of technology which used to be green pastures are now filled with young brilliant minds doing incredible things.

There are more devs in the ecosystem of a javascript framework than there were people in the web space just 15 years ago. Or at least so it seems.

Now when the AI is going to come, it's going to take it months if not weeks to raise to the top and make everyone obsolete.

So suddenly, all these highly intelligent, highly educated people have their rugs pulled from beneath them by a service which improves itself and uses 5 minutes to write code which is orders of magnitude more superior than what a team of 100 could accomplish in 1 year..

What will all the humans do when this happens ?

"Computers will learn to think, imo you would be a fool to believe otherwise."

Sure, but software developers will be the last jobs to become obsolete, just before the Singularity. At which point it won't really matter any more for us that there won't be jobs - either we'll be in control of the computers and be free to do whatever we want, or we'll all be destroyed by them.

The self-driven car needs someone to tell it where to drive. The self-programmable program needs someone to tell it what to program. (We already have these, they are called compilers, and they are getting better all the time.)

The question is: is deciding where to drive as hard as deciding what to program?

That map indicating truck driver as the most common job, is fraudulent in concept.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt-the-mo...

yup, hang on - I'm working on it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com