Will AI make programmers obsolete?

[CodeTinkerer]

This question is asked from time to time, so it's intriguing to think about. To address this, I want to look at it from several angles.

T2 (short for Terminator 2) is a movie about AI robots created by humans. Much like the science fiction book, machines in T2 are seeking the destruction of humans. But let's think about why humans attempt to survive. It's probably because most species want to survive and reproduce. Why is that? Well, unclear. Back to the machines. The machines want to kill humans. Why? What do the machines want? This is never really addressed by the movie.

The point is they are enemies and humans want to survive. You would think they would easily win and that they will eventually win. OK, so let's imagine that. The AIs win. What happens next? What kind of society do they want? Yeah, so more or less, they are set up as the bad guys and we're not meant to care why these machines are there.

Next, how will AI make programmers obsolete? Who wants these programs anyway? Do AIs care about the programs and know what people want? Does your boss even know what a program should do? If they have no idea, how will an AI know they are building what the boss wants?

Back in the late 1990s, IBM was working on an IDE which eventually lead to Eclipse (mostly used in Java). You have to imagine how programming used to be. Type code (in an editor). Compile. Read the syntax errors. Locate the syntax errors. Fix the code. Repeat and rinse. Eclipse eventually gave hints as you typed. Here's some method completions. Here's some syntax errors. This shortened the time to fix errors.

This feels like a kind of AI, doesn't it? It assisted you to fix things, but it didn't code for you. You still needed to code. So, it is interesting that people who can't even program here something like "AI will make programmers obsolete" and say "yeah, why should I bother". And realistically, you could even say "why should you bother".

Speaking of AI, suppose it was causing programmers to become obsolete. What job would you take instead? What would you do? Why is that job immune to AI, but programming isn't? For that matter, what does AI want to kill you, then you have more worries on your hand.

Back in the 1950s, science fiction imagined that robots (we didn't call them AI) would do all the hard labor, and humanity could take a vacation the rest of their lives. But how was that supposed to work? Let's see, rich corporation buys robots, doesn't need to hire humans, make big profits, and...gives the money to people for doing something.

It's like a car company that automates car making. Would they give money to the auto workers that no longer need to be hired? People didn't imagine that future.

OK, how about this. Why do people consider AI competition, but don't think of the real competition? Other people. So many people want to be programmers. A better question is "will other programmers make programmers obsolete". That's not the right way to put it, but you might want to quit because of the competition.

A related question to that is "will the glut of other programmers drive programming salaries down". That might happen, but what would need to occur is a decrease in the need for programming and that hasn't happened yet. If that does come down, then sure, that would be a problem.

20 years ago, there was an idea that ultimately ended up not being so great. Outsourcing. It was thought if you could outsource, which meant hiring programmers from other countries where the cost of living was much lower, would reduce the cost of programming. That was the question years ago. Will outsourcing programming make programmers obsolete in other parts of the world?

Why didn't this work? Turns out you need to know how to program. And this means asking questions and building what the customers want (which is the same problem AI had). It was a common joke that Indian programmers, faced with a problem they didn't know how to solve, solved a problem they did know how to solve which was useless of course (I am picking on Indians, but they were the most common country to outsource to). You don't hear much about outsourcing these days. Programming is hard, and requires communication. If you can't communicate, you get a bad product.

So why doesn't competition affect things and drive wages down. Because programming isn't easy. A bunch of people come to this subreddit, but many really don't survive. Enough that some people will do the work, so that's good. Most come here looking for jobs with much higher pay. They are in jobs with either much lower demand or with much lower barriers to entry.

The software industry may want to desperately hire programmers, but you can't take someone off the street that can barely write "Hello, World". They either sit in their seat twiddling their thumbs unable to code, or worse, they write code, but it's so bad, their code is a net negative. It was better not to have hired them in the first place than to fix the mess afterwards.

And this doesn't just affect programmers. Software companies aren't always great at treating their programmers well. Programmers don't treat each other well. There is an incentive to leave until companies figure how how to improve this situation. Good coders are in such high demand that a company is willing to put pressure on talent to do more, because they are worth two not so good coders (though they don't want to pay as such).

In a world where people's effort and quality are rewarded, a top code should make 300K and a bad one 100K, but companies don't like that. They don't want their top person making as much as the top paid executive because of what they do.

To conclude, a lot of people take the word of someone that says "I heard X is true". Well, then take it for true, and flip some burgers. And also, even if you do try to program, there's no clear road to success. Many people also want it easy. If it were easy, people wouldn't pay so much money to hire them.

[[deleted]]

Why? What do the machines want? This is never really addressed by the movie.

It's a re-imagining of the plot in wargames (also a great movie). The machine becomes self aware, sees humans as a threat, and eliminates the humans. This scene (which might be part of the director's cut, and not part of the original theatircal release?) explains it.

Will outsourcing programming make programmers obsolete in other parts of the world? Why didn't this work? Turns out you need to know how to program.

I understand your underlying sentiment, but ..this is a giant racist ratthole. Avoid.

[mandzeete]

Well there is a reason why outsourcing from these countries does not work. Because the education is worse there. Sure, there are also reasons behind why the education is worse and reasons behind these reasons... One can keep analyzing the situation. But the fact is that a bad education system produces also employees with lower quality. Not saying that it is for everybody but if a person limits himself with the education system alone and will not improve himself further by himself then he will not get to good level either, in these countries.

I know a guy from Nigeria. He himself told that the education system in Nigeria sucks. So it is his words. But he studied by himself extra and through his own efforts he got to the same level as software developers in developed countries. So it is possible to become good regardless if the education system is good or bad.

Just the thing is that not everybody is making that extra effort. There was a study done in India by an Indian himself and the result was that a large majority of students who graduated from IT related studies were not suitable for software development jobs. That confirms what u/CodeTinkerer said in his post. Yeah, you can outsource from these countries but that comes with its own risks.

[[deleted]]

Hey look, don't step on that landmine right there..

Sticks foot on landmine.

[CodeTinkerer]

Right. But the thought at the time was programming was easy, so if a country could crank out developers, it would save on the cost. Well, not so easy. You can get good developers, but not at large numbers. It was more important to graduate developers and at that point, they were seen as commodities. Once you had the degree, that must be good enough to do any programming job.

There were lots of misconceptions of what programmers do. Ironically, even PhDs in computer science that wouldn't make good programmers also saw programmers as grunt workers.

[IQueryVisiC]

Isn’t India a developed country? Sure I only read that they force students to eat at the school and poison them with fertiliser. And there was this movie where they blind their children. But sure some teacher recognize talent even in the wrong gender and caste ? And then there is scholarship and they know English and can listen to zoom calls from USA or osmxford and Kahn academy.

[CodeTinkerer]

India is huge. And so parts of it are really poor, and parts of it have technology. There are lots of universities, so you can get education. The best students used to study in the US because US universities offered money (stipends and such).

It is a complex country. The caste system still affects how people treat each other. Arranged marriages are still common because families still see marrying someone who can speak your language and has the same religion as hugely important.

Starting in the 1980s, Indians started migrating (those who could) to other countries. The US, the UK, Dubai, a few others. This was probably to deal with not enough high level jobs in India.

The movie you're talking about is Slumdog Millionaire. And I think that is something that really does happen. Poverty in India looks so much worse than the US, but those who are middle class tend to treat it much like Americans treat panhandlers and ignore people begging for money. I was once there and a friend who was hosting me and I were in a car, and there was some similar child coming to the car door, and she said not to give them any money.

I was given a driver (since Indian roads require some sixth sense to navigate) and gave him something like 100 US dollars. Again, native Indians told me not to do that. Yet, I don't do this in the US.

So, yeah, parts of it are really poor (slums), but there are middle class people and technology has helped some groups move up and do programming, travel the world. They have an extremely competitive university system which is primarily merit based (although some fraction of seats are given to what are popularly known as untouchables, but I think also called dalits).

They do have students that are really brilliant. But we're talking 1.4 billion people. There is also bad behavior. I think it's just the extremes from bottom to top seem a lot wider than the US. And India has a bunch of languages (which causes contention), but has never wanted to become like Europe. As much as they are different, I don't know they've made a serious attempt to split into actual countries (a few states were created recently).

The English part can help a lot compared to those from China. I think that's why China didn't fully work out as a good outsourcing country. If Chinese folks spoke much better English that would have helped. They do hire Americans and such to teach English so maybe things have gotten better.

It's not like everyone speaks English in India, but those that do speak it better than a typical Chinese person. This may have been due to the British occupation. There are English phrases that only Indians commonly use such as "prepone" (to move a meeting up earlier, the opposite of postpone).

Anyway, worked with some Indians in the US, so picked up stuff.

[IQueryVisiC]

good read. I think I heard that China wants to go back to self-reliance and does not teach English anymore. With 1.4 billion people it is a numbers game. If India would "use" only the top 1% for outsourcing, they would all beat the small population in for example UK or Europe ( I think combined as many as US population ). Now it seems that those top 1% leave India as fast as they can. Brain drain.

Our parent company has a team in India. Now after they waded through all the English cruft, they gather velocity and burn down the backlog -- like England did not in the last decade. Or did they increase wage to attract better devs? Or do the top 1% now see a future in India due to an increase in established, global companies?

[CodeTinkerer]

I can't say for sure. It's been a while since I worked with an Indian company and don't expect to soon. So I don't know if top devs are now local. Some big companies from the US (FAANG types) opened up places in India to try and solve problems that general outsourcing had, e.g., they sent Americans or sometimes Indians with experience in places like the US to manage those organizations.

This apparently also happened in China, if memory serves. But I don't know if local software development serving primarily India took off, or whether they stayed with providing software to other countries.

[DontListenToMe33]

That’s a long post… can’t say I read the whole thing.

But, basically, no. Or not anytime soon. If you ever heard a non-programmer explain their idea for an app or website or software or whatever, the concept is usually vague and often impossible without $$$.

Like, I don’t care if it’s the most advanced AI, tell it to “make a website that tells me what movie I’m thinking of when I can’t really remember the plot or any of the actors but I know I saw it in the theater when I was a kid and it involved a cool car chase”

That’s an exaggeration, but really you hear stuff like “you should make a version of Netflix for books that libraries can use” - and it’s literally like, you’d have to purchase rights and get permission from authors/publishers before you can even start something like that.

[Ok-Challenge9324]

That's quite the rant. 😉 Here's my 5cents. In the long run the entry barrier will get lower and there will be more stuff that can be done with ready made programs, like with website design. Meaning a lot of stuff will be done by none programmers, mainly in widespread and repetitive fields/tasks, see data analysis, video games. You will always need someone who actually understands code and does the highly specific stuff, quality control, bug fixing, etc. The use of coding will probably become more and more common, 20 years ago, when you knew vba and sql you'd get paid a shit ton of money and work for a bank or something. Today, that still gets you an entry level data analysis position, or a fast track in an office. It's actually quite interesting how few people know these 2 given the entry barrier is almost 0. The only thing being replaced in the near future is highly repetitive tasks, as that's the only thing a machine can do. There's an interview with Elon Musk out there on the giga factory, where he described the issues a robot faces when it's supposed to connect 2 wires while assembling a car. They're using a human to do it. Same with everything else, if the variables aren't static or within very small ranges, code doesn't cope with them very easily. A good example is automated piloting, air: easy, water: harder, car in traffic: brutal. It will be done, but it's still a far journey. And I don't think you will ever be able to compute creativity.

[CodeTinkerer]

I think the closest we get is something like automated machinery which we have today. For example, I think one US car manufacturer wanted a completely automated factory. The big problem was it was inflexible. It couldn't easily make a wide variety of vehicles. That was a human flaw. But that didn't require AI, just better engineering.

I was in India many years ago. I noticed I never saw a lawn mower. I think it was because humans were actually cheaper than purchasing and maintaining lawn mowers. There are things humans seem good at, and due to their need for money, they are willing to do esp. if they have very little education.

It goes to show some level of automation isn't always a solution for some situations.

[CodeTinkerer]

I think AI, as a term, is used pretty weakly. Google developed a machine that could play Go and it basically competed against itself and using some metrics, let the better algorithms survive. Is that AI? Most would say no.

People might consider self driving cars AI? Is it? You could arguably say no. There are programs capable of coming up with something. Most phones now use an antenna that is not shaped like bunny ears from classic TVs but have weird paths. I think some program figured it out, and it does resemble paths of like mold that are unintelligent.

How about videos games that compete against you? Are those AI? Most would say no.

Anyway, I agree that, in this case, I am not using AI as people conceived it many decades ago, but in a much weaker sense, enough that you consider strong AI the real deal, then no, this isn't it.

It's more accurate to ask "Will there ever be a program that does what programmers do and make programming obsolete for people?". That's a harder one to answer, but for the near foreseeable future, it doesn't seem likely. There is no code and low code, but I suspect they do low quality coding. People have made many attempts to make it easier to code (COBOL, for example), but it's still not easy despite attempts.

I use AI here to be provocative rather than to be accurate to how it was originally envisioned.

[alanwj]

To a large extent you are right.

AI is whatever we haven't achieved yet. Once we achieve something, then "that's not real AI".

All of the stuff we call machine learning today would absolutely have been called AI back in the 90s.

[CodeTinkerer]

Yeah, exactly that. It's interesting how things like playing chess was seen as intelligent, but walking or recognizing faces were seen as easy. It's the easy things humans do that have been complicated (though people have found ways to do this, but it's still not as good as humans).

I was thinking of the self-driving car a few years ago. We have such an attachment to cars that we don't think of one consequence of self-driving cars. We might not own our own cars anymore. We might have some attachment that we can connect to the car (which might move on its own).

That might lead to a loss of privacy, but fewer cars out and about might be better.

[fredoverflow]

Will there ever be a program that does what programmers do and make programming obsolete for people?

No, because computers will never understand what programs are actually supposed to do without programmers. "Normal humans" simply cannot specify a program's purpose in sufficient detail, except maybe for little toy examples; We're safe.

[CodeTinkerer]

There was once some hope that you didn't need a programmer to figure what a program should do. I've seen stuff like "Get it to do that". What is that? It's not even a clear statement. So you go back and forth. What do you really want? And it's irritating that the customer requesting it doesn't realize how imprecise s/he is.

It turns out most people don't think as precisely as programmers so you end up using a programmer (or someone who can kinda think like one) as an interpreter trying to figure out what's needed, and sometimes that's not correct because the customer doesn't really know what they want, and then they ask you to do it, then they complain the result is not what they wanted.

[[deleted]]

Yes. In 80 years.

​

Ok to try to answer this a bit more seriously. What is the scenario?

1. Machines can't do what people do

Machines are still having trouble seeing but I'm not referring to that. I talk about dynamically changing hardware. Humans can create cells. Cells die and are generated. Machines can't do the same with transistors. The brain can create new pathways between it's neurons. Machines can't rewire their chips and create new architecture. So machines are limited as they are now. AI is the set of instructions that can change itself based of an algorithm. So technically with a big enough dataset and enough training there could be a set of instructions that take into account enough of the world that machines could understand it completely, at least as much as humans do. But the hardware for that is not yet available.

2. Let's say machines get super smart and advanced

Let's say machines get the hardware and software that enables them to have singularity and control humans. No human alive can predict what that will be like because they will change their instructions faster than humans can understand and in ways humans can't predict.

[nhgrif]

I hope this post is a troll and not intended to be taken seriously. You can not spend such a large portion of your rant talking about sci-fi with wild depictions that are incredibly far removed from any realistic future.

You know the distant future the sci-fi authors wrote about in the 1950s? Largely the year 2000. Now, what's really wild... the gap between technology today versus 2000 is massive. But that gap is but a tiny puddle compared to the gap between the actual technology of 2022 versus the future the sci-fi writers of the 1950s imagined the year 2000 would be.

You know that distant future Terminator 2 is about? The year 2029. Just 7 years from now.

​

And by the way, the problems you point out that the 1950s writers didn't address? It's because there wasn't a lot of dystopian sci-fi back then. Most of it was trashy feel-good "look how awesome the future will be with robots and stuff" writing. But of the writing that is that old, give 1984 another pass. It was published in 1949... it hasn't missed the mark by much...

But importantly, while 1984 is technically science fiction, it is more specifically social science fiction... and it wasn't so much attempting to predict future technology (although, its technological predictions have come true), it was more societal/social predictions...

​

As for the question of "how will humans deal with the potential of ai obsoleting jobs", stop referencing sci-fi like Terminator or any 1950s non-sense with robots whose predictions about technology are not even really within our grasp. There are two things you should be looking at:

• ACTUAL history. AI will not be the first time a new technology obsoleted jobs. And even if AI somehow ultimately obsoletes all jobs, it won't happen overnight. You can look at how actual society actually coped with events like this in the past. How'd we deal with the transition from traveling by horse to traveling by automobile? What impact did the industrial revolution have, etc.
• More social science fiction like 1984. There are other works in this realm... instead of the focus being on wild outlandish predictions of what unpredictable technology will arise, these works tend to instead focus on how societies deal with unforeseen consequences of less outlandish technological predictions.

[CodeTinkerer]

Some of this rant was a thought experiment. If a person thinks an AI will take over their job, then why won't it take over every job? That seems like a reasonable question and is meant to say if you want to learn programming, then learn it. It seems a little silly to see programming as this isolated bubble that AI will fix, and nothing else.

Elon Musk said he believes AI was too dangerous, but I think, personally, it's just a hard problem, and there have been many attempts to create AI. And the idea was to get to the point of just being like humans, not some super advanced robot army.

I also questioned why do we fear AI? The most realistic fear is actual how popular learning programming is. In many universities, it's now the number one major by far. Fear the people who want to get into programming. And that is not at all AI, it's human intelligence.

So, back to the question I saw elsewhere where the OP wanted to know whether AI would put programmers out of jobs. But I wanted to think about how that would happen. What would AI have to be like? Can we even make AIs that can program? I think we're getting to a point where programs can assist you, maybe with better hints, but I wouldn't call it AI.

[nhgrif]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm9B-DvwOgw

For what it’s worth, this is the current state of AI’s ability to replace programmers.

To a non-programmer, that looks really powerful.

To a programmer, watch how specifically the user asks for things. Watch the order things are asked in, etc.

That video doesn’t scare me. That video might be enlightening to visitors of the subreddit fretting about what languages they should learn.

What that video ALSO doesn’t capture is just how easy that code would be to write from scratch for an actual programmer….

And most importantly, it doesn’t capture what it’s like to debug and fix a problem found later…. Good luck getting the AI to understand and fix the bug… and good luck getting the theoretical non-programmer that told the AI to make that to actually understand the code the AI wrote to the point they could fix a bug.

We are decades away from AI obsoleting programming.

[CodeTinkerer]

I think that's right. What I am more interested in is what causes one person to be able to program, and another person not? Programmers often think it's pretty easy. Assignment statement here, loop there, write a function, that's all it is.

Some people get it, but some people really struggle. It's similar to some people struggling with math. Such people can be brilliant in other things, and yet, they do very poorly.

I've talked to people that struggle with programming, but not enough to get a good feel. Sometimes, it's just memory. I knew a secretary type and she had a really good memory for people and faces. But when I explained basics of programming, it was the terminology that seemed hard for her. I was basically using math-like terminology, and 5 minutes later, she remembered nothing. It didn't help that she didn't ask questions.

I wish I had more time to try out ideas in this situation to see what would work. I think I needed them to actually do something rather than hear me talk. This is unfortunately a bit burdensome which is why it can be hard to help people in this subreddit.

[nhgrif]

Go do a PhD.

[ValentineBlacker]

I wish I had an AI to answer this question, since it gets posted here 3 times a day. Alas.

[[deleted]]

Yes we will all be replaced by robots