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Will programming be automated? (A Slack Chat and Commentary)

Tariq Ali on February 03, 2017

Software Developers Worry They Will be Replaced by AI (Press Release at 03/08/2016): Developers fear that their own obsolescence will be spurred ...
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agfnov profile image
Aleksey Agafonov

Guys, not technically but philosophically speaking doesn't this Law cancels (to some degree) automation downsides like so called 'mass unemployment'?

Tog's Law of Commuting:

"The time of a commute is fixed. Only the distance is variable." Translation? People will strive to experience an equal or increasing level of complexity in their lives no matter what is done to reduce it. Make the roads faster, and people will invariably move further away.

My point – we'll find stuff to do and create new ways of spending of lives – space exploration, huge projects, advanced gaming etc.

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Tariq Ali

It could, but only if that Law holds true. If, at any point, people stop worrying about the preservation of complexity, then problems might arise.

In addition, automation downsides like "mass unemployment" can still be a problem because it may take time for society to slowly compensate for the reduced complexity of its actions. This "mass unemployment" might be temporary (for some definition of "temporary"), but it would still cause social turmoil and chaos. It also doesn't help that there's no "end-state" to strive for...automation isn't going to stop. As soon as we develop new jobs and new work, those new jobs are in danger of also being automated away (for us to worry about even newer jobs and even newer work) . Society could quickly cycle between "mass unemployment" and "full employment", depending on the speed of our technological progress.

EDIT: "Retraining" and "retooling" existing people for new jobs would also become very expensive, especially when those new jobs can quickly become obsolete thanks to automation (forcing another round of "retraining" and "retooling"). If people are complaining about JavaScript Fatigue now, what do you think is going to happen when all fields start experiencing churn?

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cosminn777

This comment is better than the article itself.

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Bryan Baldwin

High level programmers, who have never programmed for an actual hardware target, but play around in sandboxes created with software designed "platforms" could be replaced with automation. The mental modeling of that kind of code is so robotic already, we are just taking the next step by finally removing the frailty of flesh and blood components.

Someone has to write and maintain the automated programmers ;)

Someone else has to write and maintain other low-level hardware centric code, and jeer the programmers programming automated programmers for essentially the same reasons they mocked the predecessors they replaced. :P

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Michael Larson

Not only does the automated systems need to be maintained but the these systems would need highly specific requirements to generate the code properly and test that it is complete.

So in my view programming would simply transfer to a much higher level language. It might mean it is easier, but it may get even more complex espically when you have a bug in this computer generated code, and then you can't reproduce it with a spec test. Would the computer understand why the bug is happening? Some times the users what something changed, but is it even feasible or even advisable to do it? As developers big part of the job is dealing with complexity so others in the business don't need to. Automation may make it easier but it may also make things much more complex. We often have the tendancy to fool ourselfs into thinking things are much more simipler then what they really are.

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Daniel de Souza Carvalho

Yes! Code will be automated too! Check out Wolfram Language, it is the highest level language I know about. You can ask stuff like "GDP from USA by population", "apple, ibm, oracle stocks comparison" and it gives you a good answer...

But I don't think a general code robot will come up soon. I think it gonna be such as robots in factories, they do specific jobs, for example, soldering, painting and so on... there are many robots in a factory for very specific tasks, and humans too (but just some of them). And in additional, there is Engineer to fix robots!

Take a look at Oracle APEX, or Spring Roo those tools automate a lot of programming job, if you use it in the appropriate way, you can save a lot of coding time!

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cosminn777

You are right. This comment is better than the article itself.

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legolord208 profile image
jD91mZM2

I mean, there is Scratch...