[Swizec]

> whether that day is years or decades away

Yes, it's both. Depends on the task.

Afaik we can already program industrial robots by showing them what to do. Robot records movement in its actuators, then keeps replaying over and over.

And we already have machine learning agents that can observe your behavior and learn which news stories are "good" news stories and which aren't. (algo newsfeeds). You could use them to observe a magazine editor and after a few issues, you'd have a robo editor.

[webmaven]

That's not "showing them what to do" it is more along the lines of "hand-holding".