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The Robots That Will Put Coders Out of Work
snydeq writes Researchers warn that a glut of code is coming that will depress wages and turn coders into Uber drivers, InfoWorld reports. "The researchers — Boston University's Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Guillermo LaGarda, and Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs — aren't predicting some silly, Terminator-like robot apocalypse. What they are saying is that our economy is entering a new type of boom-and-bust cycle that accelerates the production of new products and new code so rapidly that supply outstrips demand. The solution to that shortage will be to figure out how not to need those hard-to-find human experts. In fact, it's already happening in some areas."
Don't worry too much. Economics is essentially pseudoscience, so don't put too much stock in the report.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
No, this dream about the 'new jobs' isn't supported by a lot of evidence. New jobs will likely not be created in the numbers necessary to give jobs to everyone displaced. Actually, not even close, and that'll be true in all sectors. https://ir.citi.com/FItMGwO7Z6...
Imagine how many more programmers would be needed if we didn't have compilers. Or automatic code generators. And the whole point of machine learning is that you write software that teaches itself how to do something, rather than program it directly.
Software developers have been quite good at moving up into higher levels of abstraction each time we multiply our productivity. There's so much work to do that I doubt our tools will ever "displace" us.
Meh. I'd read this as:
"Researchers and writers jealous of massive demand and high wages of programmers, predict doom and gloom for those that picked a reasonably lucrative career path". Or perhaps "You programmed all this shit that's taking our jobs away... you'll get yours too someday!" Of course, the article is paywalled, so I can't see how ridiculous and speculative it is for myself. Or rather, I wouldn't bother to pay.
Most of the examples in the article covered things like writing passable articles on local sports stories. That's a little bit different than the work I do, thank you, which isn't copy-paste crapola or rattling out statistics surrounded by fluff. It's the sort of stuff I get headaches designing and thinking about for days on end, spend time rewriting and optimizing, and talking about with other programmer friends when I come up with a really elegant solution. It's trying to figure out how to do things that no one else has actually done before, and doing it with very demanding constraints of size and speed.
Maybe some jobs can be automated away, but I'd probably have a hard time calling them real programming jobs if that's the case. A lot of programming is about creative problems solving, not just pure logic, which is just the means to an end. If a "robot" can do that before I'm dead, I'll eat my hat.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Any good software architect or engineer should have the goal of minimizing the needed code / work for a project. If it takes metaprogramming, then fine. If it requires creating general purpose run-times (such as auto optimizers, such as simple hill climbers or as advanced as large neural nets) thats fine too. If the general purpose runtimes can code and thus are meta programs, great.
The idea of declarative programming for specialized run-times is nothing new. If you apply it to a general runtime that can do programming, you then have a system that makes functions that meet specs: programming moves to producing what ever declarative specs such a system consumes. Once again its just a move to a higher level language and abstraction. If (and thats a big if) its trivial to write in such a language, and all us coders no longer need skill or experience to develop new applications and we all become unemployed, well, thats the goal right: make developing your applications trivial?
Every advancement we make, assemblers, higher level languages (like C), and all those language paradigms (OOP, functional, generics/templates etc) are supposed to help with this. So are libraries. We make software hundreds of thousands of times more complex than we used to because of these advances. Much of the software of today may become trivialized by the coming advancements just as much old software has been since we started programming. Maybe we will just keep making software more complex, or maybe well will create more different applications, or maybe we will just have time to catch up, optimize and fix all the broken shit? Or most of us could become unemployed because we have enough complexity, and new tools will make the work needed go down not up.
This is a "we'll all have flying cars" sort of paper by people who could not make flying cars but were convinced that they'd be here any moment.
Strong AI is the first "computer program" that has the potential to automate the act of creativity. Everything less can be a compiler, a pattern recognizer, an Uber driver, and in general a tool that does what it is told .
And we are not particularly closer to Strong AI than when it was first theorized.
I would be more impressed with a paper by people who could actually make the software these guys theorize about, rather than sophomoricaly discussing it.
Bruce Perens.
I'm not sure he will be laughing - he never said that Capilism was all-out evil, only that it will by necessity come to an end, because it causes growing instability. In his opinion it was inevitable that the gap between rich and poor will grow under capitalism, and that this will lead to violent revolutions, but now a days this scenario has got competition from things like resource shortages and the fact that we will eventually reach some physical limit on this planet. As he pointed out, a sustainable society is one where we move beyond the dogma of capitalism and address the limitations in that system. It may well end up looking like a form of communism.
don't put too much stock in the report.
It is ridiculous that they think programmers will become Uber drivers. We will have self driving cars long before we have robots that write code.
Let's see them work with PHB's and clueless users to nail down "requirements". Automating logic is easy, automating prediction of random idiots is not so easy because randomness is by definition not predictable.
You have go to lunch with and sit in boring meetings with them to figure them out, and the robot will be booted out of the room because it will ask good but embarrassing, ego-shattering questions; and not get the design analogies that use Kardashian asses as reference points, asking silly questions in an attempt to figure it out. The business world is bunches of social institutions much more than it is think tanks.
You are trying to replace humans, not Vulcans. Kirk ran the missions better than Spock because he could identify better with illogical and petty aliens.
Table-ized A.I.
Something similar can be said about this prediction in general. Before the programmer who is automating job X is laid off, the person currently performing job X will be laid off due to the new program. Programmers will outlast the positions they are automating.
Which is easier, programmers moving on to another automation, or the replaced employee learning a different skill?
If I were the author, I'd worry less about the programmer and more about how this world will handle the potential mass unemployment situation.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
They've been predicting this sort of thing for literally decades. Anyone here old enough to remember "4GLs"?
Software development is a creative art, much to the frustration of those in management that want it to be unskilled labor. Every time we get more powerful tools, all we do is come up with more powerful demands.
There are some areas where little new software development is being done, since we already have a glut of editors and accounting systems that work more or less well off-the-rack, but every business seems to have certain areas where only bespoke software will do for them. Either customizations on a standard product or a completely in-house designed product.
The time to worry is when one of those "instant app" systems comes out that actually CAN deal with stuff like that. The hallmark of all of the very long line of "silver bullet" programmers-will-become-obsolete systems is that they can do a real bang-up job as long as all you want is to write the same program over and over again. But they all (so far) start breaking down the minute the end users say "That's wonderful. But can you just make it do...?"
Yes, all of these things you mentioned have resulted in less software jobs. Oh wait.
It's not a huge leap to imagine that one might construct a formal language for program specification that would allow you to automate translation of the spec into a code skeleton.
It already exists, it's called UML. The problem is, the specifications typically turn out to be as big and complex as it would have been originally writing in actual code. People who try to implement ideas like yours are usually surprised to find that there isn't really much redundancy in the code to begin with, thus writing the spec requires quite a number of details.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."