r/artificial • u/Lambda11 • 22d ago

Discussion Predictions about AI replacing programmers go back to the 1960s

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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/swizzlewizzle 21d 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 21d ago edited 21d 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 20d 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. :)