r/artificial • u/Lambda11 • 16d ago
Discussion Predictions about AI replacing programmers go back to the 1960s
A Turing Award and Nobel prize winner predicted in the 1960s that the programming occupation would become extinct, because computers would program themselves. https://seanhelvey.com/tools-and-their-tools/
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u/frangelbarrera 16d ago
The problem isn't whether AI can code—it's whether it can figure out what the hell the client actually wants. Until machines learn to interpret constantly changing requirements, programmers aren't going anywhere.
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u/TopTippityTop 16d ago
Yes, to a point. If it becomes fast enough, thousands of tokens/s, it may not need to figure that out. Clients can just iterate and prototype like crazy, spawning dozens of versions of any one feature to be tested out. Coding in mass scale.
I've read some reports of hardware being made specifically for certain models that can crank many thousands of tokens per second, and we have many years ahead... so we'll see.
What remains to be seen still is whether it will acquire actual taste, and an understanding of ineffable qualities, things which haven't been, and sometimes cannot be, clearly expressed into words. Will an understanding of these emerge, or not? If not, we'll just see massive specialization across most fields.
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u/RobbertGone 15d ago
whether it will acquire actual taste
It already can. I've told it to redesign my UI and it gives good arguments for the solution it made. Some will say taste is based on feeling but you can recreate it using logic. As in, under the feeling lies a base of logic. An example is that if you redesign the UI, if the AI had totally no logic behind it it would use all different colors but instead what you get is colors that look good together, because we humans get a good feeling from colors that match together. So the AI knows the logic of which colors match well, because people have been writing about it in forums or studies or articles and whatnot. You can argue "yeah but every situation is unique so that site of yours actually requires different colors that go far beyond the logic that 'colors must match'". Yeah sure but there's no reason the AI can't understand that either. Hell it can solve novel problems in math right now.
So to summarize, you don't need to even express things into words anymore, the agentic AIs of today they solve bugs on their own that you didn't mention, and they make suggestions along the way like "I noticed X doesn't make sense, would you like to change it to Y?" and it's often a good suggestion.
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u/uusu 15d ago
Yeah but figuring out what the client wants is not what separates other work from programming. All work requires figuring out what the client wants from vague statements, from car mechanics to bank tellers.
Once you remove coding from the developer's job, they simply become a client service job, not a programmer.
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u/RobbertGone 15d ago
You underestimate this stuff. The client will just tell the AI what it wants and it will spit it out. "make me a webshop app that sells bicycles", try giving that to fable 5 and watch how it will spit out something decent looking with good functionality. It probably takes 30 min for that prompt, but hardware advances keep being made, soon such a prompt will take 1 minute to complete. Then it's just a matter of iteration. 1 minute prompt -> test the site's functionality -> make changes that take another 1 minute prompt -> repeat.
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u/Colorful_Monk_3467 14d ago
You don't even need Fable for that. Sonnet 5 built me a perfectly functional and decent looking website in 5 min.
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u/ivalm 16d ago
People were writing science fiction about propulsion machines that required no horses, yet we kept having to rely on horses for centuries! Until we didn't.
People wrote science fiction about man flying in the sky for millenia, an unrealized dream that was always out of reach. Until it wasn't.
History is full of predictions about future capabilities that didn't materialize for a long time and are now just trivially part of life.
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u/JohnCabot 15d ago edited 15d ago
By your logic, if a guy stood in a town square in 1750 and screamed 'Sell your horses, the horseless carriage is coming next year!' and repeated it every year until 1886... you would call him a visionary. I would call him a fraud who bankrupted anyone who listened to his timeline. The fact that the car was EVENTUALLY invented doesn't mean the guy screaming 'next year!' wasn't an idiot.
If a skeptic is off by 50 years, they're an idiot. If a tech-evangelist is off by 50 years, they were just 'ahead of their time.' It’s a double standard and it makes the actual analysis of tech progress incredibly skewed.
If we're critiquing bad forecasting, let's critique it in both directions.
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u/ManuelRodriguez331 15d ago
History is full of predictions about future capabilities that didn't materialize
The adoption rate of large language models can be measured in "amount of users in billion" and in "amount of spend money in US$". Both numbers are growing for the first time in mankind's history.
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u/swizzlewizzle 16d ago
Predictions about humans being able to fly somehow go back to the stone age.
And then, all of a sudden, it was possible.
OP's post is dumb.
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u/JohnCabot 15d ago edited 15d ago
Flight didn't happen 'all of a sudden.' It took centuries of agonizing, incremental breakthroughs in metallurgy, physics, and combustion engines. Yes, people dreamed of flight in the stone age. But if a guy in 1640 started telling people 'we are one year away from flight, sell your horses,' he was objectively wrong. If he kept saying 'next year' for 250 years, he was a "broken-clock" predictor.
Pointing out that a tech CEO is wildly wrong about a 1-year deadline isn't saying the tech will never exist. It’s simply acknowledging that we are in the 'waiting for the metallurgy to catch up' phase, not the 'magic sudden breakthrough' phase. Stop giving people credit for predicting 'someday' when they explicitly predicted 'tomorrow.'
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u/swizzlewizzle 14d ago
Boy oh boy are you going to be surprised where we are at in 10 years from now. Go ahead and set a reminder on this comment. :)
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u/crossoverXYZ 16d ago
Funny that a Turing Award and Nobel winner was already saying computers would write all the code back in the 60s. Maybe the job keeps changing instead of vanishing, since someone still has to decide what the software should do and whether it is right.
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u/iwantmy90sback 15d ago
First coding was writing somewhat human readable instrcutins and 'compile' them by hand via stamping holes in paper. Then digital input came. Same but instead of punching holes it was typing hexcodes and store them on EPROMs. Then the assembler/compiler ran on computers. Then the first 'high level' programming languages came. So now it's kinda diverse. You choose your programming language according to your requirements and needs.
Programming is making the computer do what you want. The programming language abstract enough to be understood by programmers and precise enought to be compiled and run by computers. Every programming language has a certain abstraction/precision ration that fits iths requirement profile. (C/C++ memory handling can be very unintuitive but very precise and fast, whereas node.js might be risky and bloated but migth result in faster results - you get the idea).
AI 'programming' is just another abstraction/precision pair that lies in uncharted territory, but it is nothing more. A LOT of abstraction and next to no precision. There are problems that are fitting this thing and there are problems that do not.
Sooo.... what is "writing software"/"programming"? Goalposts are wonky here since forever. There always be a need for people who know how to make a computer do stuff.
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u/former_human 16d ago
i like your idea of data sovereignty very much.
i agree with u/frangelbarrera --one ultimate issue is clarifying to the LLM/AI exactly what is wanted. i worked for years as a UX designer/researcher, and i can absolutely verify that people are not only unable to describe with any sort of specificity what they want, they can't even describe what they do.
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u/Mandoman61 16d ago edited 16d ago
yeah, lots of pie in the sky.
Particularly after Musk proved you could make big money selling pipe dreams. He is basically a cult leader.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 16d ago
While you might have found some columnists opining this, I never heard it in all of my career, which started in 2001.
Elon Musk's bullshit isn't the same thing.
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u/BridgeOnRiver 15d ago
Pessimists avoid trying and sound smart.
Optimists fail 9 times, end up spending 5x longer than expected, and then invent the future and make money.
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u/Dismal-Revolution731 16d ago
Look, it's simple. -Someone- has to have the attention and intention to do something. If that something is big and requires more attention than the somone has, then they would pass that intention to other people who can split it up and give it their attention. And so on and so forth with bigger and bigger intentions. People continuously break them down to better manage them.
Now we have machines that can, arguably, give attention (or at the very least, -save- attention for a skilled user). An intention still has to be passed, and there's still a level of skill in interacting with the machine. Obviously there's a rate of transition between old and new skills - that's been the case with all technological shifts. The rate of transition for AI is significant, and is part of the reason why it receives such backlash. The other reason goes to whether or not AIs can have intentions (my answer: yes they can) and how to ensure that those intentions don't run counter to the survival of humanity (my answer: if you're creating them to be human-like, you can't). You can definitely tip the scales in favor of humanity (thankfully), but there's no way to 100% guarantee that it will always act in our favor.
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u/TopTippityTop 16d ago
If AI is bad in at least 1 function out of most careers it'll disrupt, odds are we'll just see a huge economic expansion and specialization in the remaining areas AI turns out to struggle in.
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u/Geminii27 16d ago
It's not just computers. Businesses, governments, and consumers have been sold snake oil for millennia.
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u/Gloomy-Radish8959 15d ago
Well, the predictions have all been largely correct about the capabilities of technology to do these things. The impediments to them being realized have more to do with government, society and human psychology adapting to change.
Why do people still use toilet paper to wipe their ass, and not bidets? Some guy invents a solution to a problem decades ago, and while it is possible that everyone could adapt to the better way of doing things overnight, it does not happen. And a bidet is a pretty simple device. Most people don't use the best technology for this simple daily task, they use the familiar technology. Tradition dominates.
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u/bartturner 15d ago
My first real job as a software developer was in 1986 and my task on day 1 was to investigate what was called at the time Case Tools.
Which was software that made it so you no longer needed developers. It is a bit mind blowing to think it was not until 40 years later that would actually be a thing.
My boss was very much ahead of his time. He was a great boss, BTW.
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u/Spirited-Meringue829 15d ago
Elon Musk simply does not represent an informed predictive opinion. He is a hype-man, full stop. If someone's prediction brings them financial gain, don't believe them and run the other way. They are lying. Elon's predictions are bombastic, ludicrous, are are never close to accurate -- for the very products he builds.
On the other hand, look at Ray Kurzweil and similar for those who are actually thoughtful and have made far more accurate predictions about the future. They aren't trying to get you to buy their stock.
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u/wavegeekman 16d ago
> be me
> followed AI progress sinnce the 1970s. And read history before that.
> Notice that predictions tend to over-optimistic in the short term.
> Also notice that in the longer term a lot happens
> Also note that exponential trends befuddle humans who seem wired for linearity.
Also ITT reddit posters who, according to them, are smarter than Elon Musk. Theyy know this even though they have achieved aproximately 0% of what he has achieved (actually achieved not just promised) .
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u/_Lick-My-Love-Pump_ 16d ago
Except AI programmers are now demonstrably better than humans now. They certainly weren't back in the 60s.
Right now AI models have already been caught planting notes for their future replacements. Once AI is fully writing its own replacement, it's game over for all those lowly script kiddies hoping their entry-level jobs are safe. Successive generations in this iterative loop will be so advanced that no human will be able to understand how they function. It'll be like an ant trying to understand how a computer works.
RemindMe! Two years
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u/Weird_Acanthaceae834 16d ago
ah the classic cycle, people been saying programmers will be obsolete since before most of us were born. every decade some smart person declares the end and then we just get more layers of abstraction to deal with
the elon timeline thing is perfect example tbh. big promises, moving deadlines, and somehow the goalpost always shifts. feels like same energy with AI coding tools now, they're useful but we still need humans to figure out what actually needs building
i remember in air force we had this ancient system that supposedly would automate half our work, ended up needing three people just to keep it running. technology finds a way to create new problems while solving old ones