[vczf]

The endpoint is that being a programmer becomes as obsolete as being a human "calculator" for a career.

Millions, perhaps billions of times more lines of code will be written, and automated programming will be taken for granted as just how computers work.

Painstakingly writing static source code will be seen the same way as we see doing hundreds of pages of tedious calculations using paper, pencil, and a slide rule. Why would you do that, when the computer can design and develop such a program hundreds of times in the blink of an eye to arrive at the optimal human interface for your particular needs at the moment?

It'll be a tremendous boon in every other technical field, such as science and engineering. It'll also make computers so much more useful and accessible for regular people. However, programming as we know it will fade into irrelevance.

This change might take 50 years, but that's where I believe we're headed.

[withinboredom]

Yet, we still have programmers writing assembly code and hand-optimizing it. I believe that for most software engineers, this will be the future. However, experts and hobbyists will still experiment with different ways of doing things, just like people experiment with different ways of creating chairs.

An AI can only do what it is taught to do. Sure, it can offer unique insights from time to time, but I doubt it will get to the point where it can craft entirely new paradigms and ways of building software.

[vczf]

You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained.

(Humans will still have to set the goals and objectives, unless we unleash an ASI and render even that moot.)

[withinboredom]

AI, even in its current form can provide some interesting results. I wouldn’t underestimate an AI, but I think you might be underestimating the ingenuity of a bored human.

[ta1243]

Humans aren't bored any more [0]. In the past the US the US had 250 million people who were bored. Today it has far more than than scrolling through instagram and tiktok, responding to reddit and hacker news, and generally not having time to be bored

Maybe we'll start to evolve as a species to avoid that, but AI will be used to ensure we don't, optimising far faster than we can evolve to keep our attention

[0] https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/social-media-profound-boredo...

[withinboredom]

I’m bored all the time and I’m a human. Last I checked anyway.

[vczf]

I agree, it's definitely still possible to get bored.

If I stop making progress on my personal projects, sinking my free time into games or online interaction is very unsatisfying.

[nradov]

Perhaps, but evolutionary results are difficult to test. They tend to fail in bizarre, unpredictable ways in production. That may be good enough for some use cases but I think it will never be very applicable to mission critical or safety critical domains.

Of course, code written by human programmers on the lower end of the skill spectrum sometimes has similar problems...

[vczf]

It doesn't seem like a completely different thing to generate specifications and formally verified programs for those specifications (though I'm not familiar with how those are done today).

[jimbokun]

I mean, I don’t even like programming with Spring because what all of those annotations are doing is horribly opaque. Let alone mountains of AI generated code doing God knows what.

I mean Ken Thompson put a back door into the C compiler no one ever found. Can you imagine what an AI could be capable of?

[beacon294]

ASI?

[vczf]

Artificial Super-Intelligence

[jimbokun]

It will equally eliminate the need for all scientists and engineers. And every other human occupation.

[goatlover]

I don't believe that's going to happen. If it were, humans would have stopped playing chess. But not only do lots of people still play chess, people making a living playing chess. There are YT channels devoted to chess. The same thing will be true of almost all sports, lots of entertainment, and lots of occupations where people prefer human interaction. Bar tenders and servers could be automated away, but plenty like to sit at a bar or table and be served by someone they can talk to. I have a hard time seeing nurses being replaced. Are people going to want the majority of their care automated?

I also don't know what it means to completely remove humans from all work. Who is deciding what we want done? What we want to investigate or build? The machines are just gong to make all work-related decisions for us? I don't believe that. It would cease being our society at that point.

Which brings up the heart of the matter. Why are we trying to replace ourselves? It's our civilization, automation are just tools we use to be more productive. It should make our lives better, not remove us from the equation.

My guess is the real answer is it will make some people obscenely rich, and give some governments a significant technical advantage over others.

[Aerbil313]

Chess is not something you make new discoveries in anymore, not something that results in a product that people pay for. Poor analogy.

[SomeoneFromCA]

Ahaha, no. Every time period has its own distinct style. you can tell the difference between Magnus, Kasparov, Capablanca etc. Lots of innovation in chess in fact, almost uninfluenced by machines.

[jimbokun]

“It will cease being our society” is the most likely outcome. Current politics demonstrates we have lost the ability to collaborate for our common good. So the processes accelerating AI capabilities will be largely unchecked until it’s too late and the AIs will optimize whatever inscrutable function they have evolved to prioritize.

[kaba0]

> The endpoint is that being a programmer becomes as obsolete as being a human "calculator" for a career.

Yeah, the same time the singularity happens, and then your smallest problem will be eons bigger than your job.

But LLMs can’t solve a sudoku, so I wouldn’t be too afraid.

[jacobr1]

They are pretty close. LLMs can write the code the solve a sudoku, or leverage an existing solver, and execute the code. Agent frameworks are going to push the boundaries here over the next few years.

[kaba0]

> LLMs can write the code the solve a sudoku

It’s literally part of its training data. The same way it knows how to solve leetcode, etc.