[zach]

Seems trivial, but I have met someone whose ardent hobby was programming go-playing programs. With the creation of AlphaGo Zero, one could say all the clever code ever written by humans for the purpose of playing go is obsolete.

More relevantly, I would be surprised if the shift to AI techniques in fraud detection at places like PayPal is not already having an impact on the career paths of the engineers that were tasked with maintaining and tuning their pre-ML fraud system. At one point the top engineers of the original heuristic system could have been considered their most valuable non-management employees at the company. I'm sure they're not out on the streets or anything, but I also assume the next person to take their job will not be nearly as valued.

Also, ML will impact programmer demand in subtle ways. A lot of programming is refactoring, and there is reason to believe we can refactor code, especially in certain languages, automatically to make it more aesthetic. Realistically, that seems likely to decrease demand for programmer hours. Or an ML system that can run over someone's GitHub account or repo may be the new resume screen, and if one scores badly on it that may limit the demand for them personally.

Finally, I have to think that the overall march of software towards more complex integrated systems is already a major cause of the dearth of entry-level programming positions, and ML will accelerate that trend.