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1 in 3 Developers Fear AI Will Replace Them (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: Evans Data Corp., in a survey of 550 software developers, asked them about the most worrisome thing in their careers. A plurality, 29%, chose this answer: "I and my development efforts are replaced by artificial intelligence." Surprisingly, this concern about A.I. topped the second-most identified worry, which was that the platform the developer is working on will become obsolete (23%), or doesn't catch on (14%). Concerns about A.I. replacing software developers has academic support. A study by Oxford University, The Future of Employment, warned that the work of software engineers may soon become computerized. Machine learning advances allow design choices that can be optimized by algorithms. According to Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, the thought of obsolescence due to A.I., "was also more threatening than becoming old without a pension, being stifled at work by bad management, or by seeing their skills and tools become irrelevant."
If you are worried about AI replacing you, you must be doing something very routine, not requiring anything new or creative.
I try desperately each and every day to make myself redundant through writing better software... but, alas, it has yet to happen.
Colour me sceptical. We haven't even successfully entered the technology level where systems are developed using *solely* high-level modeling languages (UML, state diagrams, Simulink, Modellica, etc) and produce production code for the whole system (not just parts that are then glued together by humans with special code), and now you want to replace everything with AI (whatever that means)? Even for established code, show me a fully functioning tool for suggesting automated bug fixes when the program crashes or has a race condition.
Isn't "Becoming old without a pension" less of a 'fear' and more of a 'guarantee'? With the exception of a few labor unions that have really dug in and not quite been extirpated yet, we are basically all playing the tables with our 401ks(if that). 'Pensions' are what the old people who accuse you of being an entitled, lazy, little shit have.
In other pedantry, isn't 'seeing your skills and tools become irrelevant' an apt description of what would happen if an AI started doing your job?
Comparing the crop of programmers back in the 1960's, 1970's, 1980's to programmers nowadays, and the type of code that they have produced, more of the current-day programmers should be worrying about being supplanted by AI
Back then (1960's to 1980's) most of those who were doing programming tried all kinds of ways to sharpen their coding skills, and their efforts were not wasted
Despite not having all the tools / toys that the current crop of programmers get, programmers of yore produce codes which were far better than what we have right now
The chief problem with current crop of programmers is that they treat programming as a way to earn a living, while programmers of yours treat what they do as their passion
Without the 'passion' factor the codes produced today are not much different from what AI can produce - and in fact, in some cases AI are producing better codes than their human counterparts
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
One of the things that has always kept me away from development and more on the systems side has been the overwhelming evidence that the job category is shrinking. Some aspects of development, such as developing in the Web Framework of the Moment, are very abstract from the actual operations performed, and are mostly gluing together libraries and API calls. It's amazing how little many developers have to do to get something to work. Phone apps are another example -- huge SDKs do almost everything for the developer; they just have to signal intent.
The thing that's complex, and that requires talent, is writing all of those frameworks, libraries, APIs and abstractions. Knowing how the full stack of a system works and what is actually happening is a very useful skill. This is why embedded developers are generally not low-level guys -- those libraries and other niceties don't fit into the tiny CPU and RAM constraints on many devices.
Then again, who knows -- cloud is killing a lot of the expert-level systems jobs as well. I've been very careful to stay a generalist, but I know lots of my colleagues who spent enormous amounts of effort learning things like Cisco networking, various VM hypervisors and SAN storage inside and out, front and back, and the cloud is slowly eating away at all of that. The days of being an EMC genius, or Exchange guru, and making massive amounts of money are numbered unfortunately -- we're experiencing similar salary reductions due to commoditization that developers are facing because of H-1Bs and other factors.
Many of us who get paid well, get paid well because we can take vague, poorly written specs, figure out the real world business requirements and fill in all the missing parts. Somehow I don't see AI figuring out what a human means in a particular business context any time soon. btw. If you do write perfect specs, you've essentially written the program. The hard work (the valuable work) is done. Picking good design patterns and coding it up is easy.
I hate the term AI. There is no intelligence in it. "AI" programs are still computer programs that execute the series of steps it was told to execute. In certain cases they seem smart because they have been trained on a huge set of scenarios (You are quickly programming the program with the massive data set and associated "answers" instead of hand coding X million cases.). These "intelligent" programs still fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out" just like any dumb computer program.
tl;dr: Creative developers are not likely to be replaced by AI.
The terms are blurred. Most people considering themselves developers actually are application programmers. Quite a few exceptional people in CS call themselves or are being classified as programmers. Apparently the almost meek title "programmer" covers more of what those people do than something like "developer".
But in the world of us mortals the title "programmer" is not taken seriously. We need to take recourse in titles like "application programmer", "web designer", "senior developer", "solution architect", "enterprise architect" and so on. But let's be brutally honest; Most of us will never make it into Wikipedia's list of programmers.
At any rate a developer can take an idea, a hunch or a vague concept and create a computing world around it. It requires huge amounts of insight and experience to come up with something simple that solves many business problems elegantly and which is accepted as a business proposition. As of yet I don't see such creative processes being replaced by AI. A machine that wins at chess or at go does so by recognizing patterns in a limited domain or by brute force but not by being particularly intelligent at identifying a problem in need of a solution. The contexts of go, chess and even navigation through traffic are huge but still extremely confined.
However, if your work consists in taking requirements and producing code than expect to be surprised.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)