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Does the Rise of AI Precede the End of Code? (itproportal.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: It's difficult to know what's in store for the future of AI but let's tackle the most looming question first: are engineering jobs threatened? As anticlimactic as it may be, the answer is entirely dependent on what timeframe you are talking about. In the next decade? No, entirely unlikely. Eventually? Most definitely. The kicker is that engineers never truly know how the computer is able to accomplish these tasks. In many ways, the neural operations of the AI system are a black box. Programmers, therefore, become the AI coaches. They coach cars to self-drive, coach computers to recognise faces in photos, coach your smartphone to detect handwriting on a check in order to deposit electronically, and so on. In fact, the possibilities of AI and machine learning are limitless. The capabilities of AI through machine learning are wondrous, magnificent... and not going away. Attempts to apply artificial intelligence to programming tasks have resulted in further developments in knowledge and automated reasoning. Therefore, programmers must redefine their roles. Essentially, software development jobs will not become obsolete anytime soon but instead require more collaboration between humans and computers. For one, there will be an increased need for engineers to create, test and research AI systems. AI and machine learning will not be advanced enough to automate and dominate everything for a long time, so engineers will remain the technological handmaidens.
Does anyone else see that AI is basically a religion to its proponents?
Until the AI writes better AI code. It's kind of like bootstrapping a compiler. Then we sit back, relax, and let the sexbots feed us peeled grapes.
> the humans are no longer coders, they will instead be writing specifications for the code
Humans wrote computer code until 1957. In 1957, it became possible to instead write a specification for what the code should DO, writing that specification in a language called Fortran. Then the Fortran compiler wrote the actual machine code.
In 1972 or thereabouts, another high-level specification language came out, called C. With C, we got optimizing compilers that totally rewrite the specification, doing things in a different order, entirely skipping steps that don't end up affecting the result, etc. The optimizing C compiler (ex gcc) writes machine code that ends up with the same result as the specification, but may get there in a totally different way.
In the late 1970s, a new kind of specification language came out. Instead of the programmer saying "generate code to do this, then that, then this", with declarative programming the programming simply specifies the end result:. "All the values must be changed to their inverse", or "output the mean, median, and maximum salary". These are specifications you can declare using the SQL language. We also use declarative specifications to say "all level one headings should end up centered on the page" or "end up with however many thumbnails in each row as will fit". We use CSS to declare these specifications. The systems then figure out the intermediate code and machine code to make that happen.
The future you suggest has been here for 60 years. Most programmers don't write executable machine code and haven't for many years. We write specifications for the compilers, interpreters, and query optimizers that then generate code that's used to generate code which is interpreted by microcode which is run by the CPU.
Heck, since the mid-1970s it hasn't even been NECESSARY for humans to write the compilers. Specify a language and yacc will generate a compiler for it.