When I was at school one of my professors joked that the halting problem would ensure that, whatever else we were able to automate, there would always be jobs f

When I was at school one of my professors joked that the halting problem would ensure that, whatever else we were able to automate, there would always be jobs for programmers. I wonder. A while ago there was the automatic statistician [1,2] which can do various statistical analyses and reporting automatically. This year there was a paper out of MIT on Deep Feature Synthesis, in which a largely automated system did quite well on Kaggle problems [3]. Now this, which seems like it could produce solutions to some problems I've used in technical phone screens. At some point, someone will write a framework which automates the process of finding human cognitive tasks to automate, and someone else will give write a cost function of automated-task-to-business-need-mismatch which is amenable to optimization, and then we can all go home. [1] http://www.automaticstatistician.com/index/ http://www.automaticstatistician.com/index/ [2] http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/lloyd/talks/jrl-auto-stat-msr-2014.pdf http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/lloyd/talks/jrl-auto-stat-msr-2014.... [3] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/EVO-DesignOpt/groupWebSite/uploads/Site/DSAA_DSM_2015.pdf https://groups.csail.mit.edu/EVO-DesignOpt/groupWebSite/uplo...