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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.
I think that once AI is advanced and friendly enough to replace me, it will be advanced enough that there will no longer be any need to do my current job. :)
Al Jazeera? Weird Al Yankovic?
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 !
and the other 2 who have actual experience with AI and know how shitty it still is, laugh at him
It seems to me being outsourced/offshored would be a much bigger and more immediate worry. I've already lost my job to visa workers before.
It's a 100% certainty that it already happened from my perspective, while AI replacing devs is pie-in-the-sky Jetson stuff.
Existing AI is pretty good at making savants, but lacks common sense, office politics skills, and the ability to deal with unexpected situations.
It's like fearing meteors more than climate change.
Table-ized A.I.
Welcome their new robotic overlords.
1/sqrt(3*4) = 28.9% which puts 29% a titch closer to 1/3 by the harmonic mean.
Measure twice. Cut once.
Sorry, Bum-A-Matic 9000(tm) already does that*.
* Urinating in stairwell feature is $200 extra.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
A program for the Apple ][ that was, IIRC, advertised as "All the programs you will ever need, for just $595?" I believe it was an interview-driven database-query generator or something like that. Wikipedia points me to this review in Byte. In reality most reviews of the program were lukewarm.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
Still, long-term, there really is no alternative to it if we want to keep civilization going.
Alternative: make fewer people.
I think we are witnessing Artificial Insanity.
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)
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.
Compilers resemble expert systems. They helped early programs become ten times more productive than machine /assembly language programs. You could argue the contrary then that AIs opened up software to more developers and types of software products. Compilers and new computer languages continue to take on new tasks like parallelization and dynamic memory management.