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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."
I can say that. Look at the quality and type of code made in the past few years, compared to what was done with far more limited tools before that. You don't really see capable tools being made these days on the GPL front, as the allure for making it big with yet another clone of an app on a store seems to take the devs there.
If you compare Katello, Foreman, Docker, and Openstack to tools made before that, the code quality is just laughable. Openstack has had years and lots of money thrown at it, and yet, it still can't do vMotion or Live Migration, nor be upgraded without a complete rebuild. Getting developers to go in and refine that code base, making it be able to work as well as ESX/vSphere does, would make life a lot easier for virtually everyone.
The "passion" seems lost, mainly because it seems that people hear the ka-ching sound of writing apps over writing something that can get them a meaningful job later on. I know this personally. I had an issue with an OS/hardware bug on one platform, wrote a fix that worked, shoved it in GitHub for public consumption... and now I'm actually getting interest from companies because the code I put up to "scratch an itch" actually is useful to people.
If a dev can write a fleshlight app, they can go into an existing large-name OSS project and start fixing shit. It might be that their pull requests may get ignored sometimes, but all it takes is just a few screws to be tightened, and that can help big time when finding a well-paying job as a true developer (as opposed to a code monkey.)
This used to be. Adds from IBM illustrate: its already reality, investing, harvesting and research data, make an medical analysis, find the best defense strategy for a trial: is all AI dominated already. In education, partly automatically written textbooks are already reality. The push for grading by the machine, to online learning are all driven mostly by reducing labor and so workers. Whether the promise that this will allow us to do more interesting thing, is constantly fading. This means now developers, doctors, lawyers, teachers. The time when only robots, self driving cars have been a threat to the workforce are long over. Even research will be affected. It is a challenge which is so urgent already now that industry leaders at the World economic forum 2016 were discussing it. It will be an important problem to tackle: what to do if we have programmed us out of work. Developers are smart, they can not be persuaded so easily by propaganda. They can read the writings on the wall, because they write it!
I designed an AI primitive capable of intuitive self reflection 35 years ago and its nodes could run in 64k. It's been fleshed out with over 12000 builds into an open source studio requiring 500Mb of ram per node, but that doesn't mean the basic algorithm can't be loaded securely into IoT devices. The problem is no one is in charge to say how this or that platform should be developed. Nevertheless I've mapped out over 1000 years of future development requiring only that AI fed by human opinions be used to replace money as the predominant means for making decisions. I'm not talking about just replacing cash but the whole capitalistic structure from invoicing to profit and loss needs to be seen by AI as the most loathsome thing in the universe.
Indeed. And here we reach the the limits of Capitalism to distribute the wealth to the population. At the same time Capitalism depends critically on people being able to buy things, hence wealth must continue to be distributed to the population or things collapse. It is no accident that an unconditional basic income for everybody is seriously being discussed now in some countries and it is not idealists with their heads in the clouds that drive this discussion. (They are routinely trying to hijack it though, which somewhat obscures that this is about a critically important problem).
The main problem today seems to be one of irrational envy: For example most ( > 80%) people in Switzerland say they would continue working with an unconditional basic income, even if that allows them to live reasonably well already. The problem is that most people think that not so may of their fellow citizens would do so. Still, long-term, there really is no alternative to it if we want to keep civilization going.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
AI taking over my job as a Software Engineer is the -last- thing I'm worried about. The developers who are afraid of such a thing must have no idea about AI.
Developing complex programs in the -last- thing an AI will be able to do. They will be able to have conversations, walk, drive, bring your kids to school and pretty much do everything else before being able to write a typical, high complexity software program.
If that point is ever reached it means we have reached the "singularity" wherein an AI is able to program a better version of itself, exponentially increasing its own intelligence.
2011 Sandy Bridge and 2015 Sky Lake are within 10% performance wise. That's what 2.5% per year? Would you still stand by your " _massively_increasing_ " Statement? Intel realized that CPUs were fast enough. Nobody is maxing out their CPU running day to day OS tasks anymore. They mostly sit idle, underclocked to save power and heat, only spinning up to full "turbo" power for brief spikes when loading a web page or a new program. Intel has famously been using these die shrinks not to improve computing power (what would consumers use it for??) but to improve thermal performance and more importantly battery life, as they fight for their lives in the mobile devices space.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
moox. for a new generation.