People still complain that machine translated Japanese is garbage so I bet will be the same with programming, some easy tass will be automated, complex stuff will be still done by humans with experience and understanding of the domain.
- There is not that much "complex" stuff going around for all the people that will be looking for a job in the field.
- what you call "garbage" might be someone else's "good enough for my needs". If I can go to Japan and a " garbage translator" still is enough for me to help navigate the city or poorly talk to a shopkeeper, then it's mission accomplished and I don't need to worry about a local guide.
- lots of "complex stuff" are dependent on context, and can be made less complex if we relax one single design constraint. E.g, centralized social media networks have a strong requirement for not losing user data. Distributed systems solve this by (a) duplicating data between every node and (b) letting it be deleted by users and node operators who do not want to have the data stored for long term.
It seems to me that you believe that what most software engineers is some dark magic that only a select few can master. It really isn't. The whole "software is eating the world" essay never mentioned what was going to happen after it ran of out of things to eat, now it is kind of obvious that it will gladly get into cannibalism.
My point was that your example was flawed, your translator friend can still have a a lot of work to do since the translators are average or garbage still.
A true intelligent AI sure could be a problem, but this stuff will just be an copilot, good enough to do basic stuff and maybe double check the programmer.
When you predict it would be possible I give the AI a JIRA ticked and it could open the application, reproduce the issue, update the ticket with details about the bug , then find the issue in a giant code base, fix it correctly etc .
Because today an AI can't do anything from the above. It can't replace a human.
My translator friend speaks no Japanese. She used to work with English, German and Portuguese. The fact that translators are still not Professional-level (yet?) is no consolation for the thousands of other professionals like her. She retired already.
> It can't replace a human.
If it provides enough leverage to today to make one person 20x more productive, then it is effectively replacing 19 humans. When it is effective to make one employee 200x more efficient, it will replace 199 humans.
And if you have enough hubris to think you are always going to be the lucky one out of the chopping block, it's not for lack of warning.
Sorry, my mistake. Replace "today" with "someday".
For "today", I've seen good engineers solving specific tasks in a third of the time already, but I won't make specific claims about absolute productivity multipliers.
>For "today", I've seen good engineers solving specific tasks in a third of the time
Specific is the important word here. Some boring tasks that can be automated in all jobs will be automated though you still need to check the AI. I assume no competent developer was fired because of that productivity boost in that specific task
You don't need to "fire" anyone for AI to cause a significant impact. All AI needs to do is to allow companies postpone hiring more people.
I really don't understand why you are being so obtuse about this. Do you honestly think that you can make the argument that software development (as an industry) is somehow immune to automation?
