[scientist]

Self-driving cars are expected to take over the roads, however no programmer is able to write code that does this directly, without machine learning. However, programmers have built all kinds of software of great value, from operating systems to databases, desktop software and so on. Much of this software is open source and artificial systems can learn from it. Therefore, it could well be that, in the end, it would be easier to build artificial systems that learn to automatically develop such software than systems that autonomously drive cars, if the right methodologies are used. The author is right to say that neural program synthesis is the next big thing, and this also motivated me to switch my research to this field. If you have a PhD and are interested in working in neural program synthesis, please check out these available positions: http://rist.ro/job-a3