[atleta]

I miss programmers from the list. For some reason we tend to think we'll be among the last ones to be automated away, while programming is probably the best documented job on the internet, the job with the largest training set. We also see that the machine is coming for us, we just keep telling that nonsense story that it only does the boring/low level stuff and imply that it will be like this for a long-long time which in my interpretation would be several decades at least. (Otherwise I don't get the dismissive tone/remarks.)

OTOH recognizing songs can still make you look cool. Like being good at chess, poker or being able to lift heavy weights are still cool even though machines are better than people (or just most people, in case of poker). The only downside is that now you can be caught being wrong ;)

[QuadmasterXLII]

If programming is automated but driving trucks still takes a human, someone will tell GPT-5 "Write a program that automates driving trucks". If that doesn't work, programming isn't automated. If it does, it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man.

[atleta]

It's not all or nothing. At least it doesn't make sense to talk about it as if it was. It doesn't have to do away with all programming jobs to make it to the list. (Especially, since the list itself defines differing levels of dangers.)

And, of course, it doesn't have to be at the level of producing a perfect solution for the input "Write a program that automates driving trucks". Programmers can't do that either. It's enough if it can produce usable and testable code based on user input and then it can refine the solution based on the feedback and then get to a complete solution with this method. If it can start asking questions, all the better.

BTW, ChatGPT can already do some of this without being tailored to do so. You can tell it to create a todo app (I know, that's just copypasta), defining the language and the framework to use. (I went with TS and Vue.) And then tell it to create a backend and to connect the two. Then you can tell to add persistance to the backend (because it does not, by default) and it will update the backend code. Before ChatGPT, I thought that back references like these would be the tricky thing. Sure, in my experiment I didn't talk like a non-tech person wanting an app, so you might say I was programming, but I really wasn't. And that's where things are now.

> it doesn't matter that programming was the first of the jobs automated in the last 48 hours of the age of man.

Now that's the thing I have always been unsure about. Whether automating programming is far enough from (super strong) AGI for programmers to feel bad about their job :)

[hnfong]

You're confusing "automating programmers" and "automating super-human programmers". Automating programming in this context means replacing 99% of the normal types of programmers. We don't know how to program driving trucks with humans yet, so there's no driving-truck-programmers to automate.

The fact is given the state of AI development today, all our jobs could be in risk in a couple years. I'm not betting on that for now since I personally think the chances are still low (due to other reasons). But being in denial through creative wordplay doesn't change the fact a single bit.