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One day there will be a trained model called "software engineer" and we will be out of a job. The training data may come from github, extracting requirements f

One day there will be a trained model called "software engineer" and we will be out of a job. The training data may come from github, extracting requirements from issues, and mapping it to the code that closed the ticket.

mikeshi42 9y ago
But then we can finally spend _all_ of our time on HN! But we really do think ML, even in the near future, will automate some of our jobs away (and that's a good thing!), if you're interested in some of our thoughts on that: https://medium.com/modeldepot/we-previously-talked-about-how-transfer-learning-will-radically-change-ml-c4fed21a65a2 https://medium.com/modeldepot/we-previously-talked-about-how...
- MayeulC 9y ago
  I was about to answer roughly the same. If someone could step up and "take my job", it would free me up for other things. I would be grad to be able to rely on a good "software engineer" model to build the next generation tooling. All in all, more performance, more efficiency, improving our tools bottom-up, going for the low hanging fruit first, to free us from the less interesting tasks. Isn't it what we always do and always did? If a task is repetitive or deterministic, I always feel like I could be spending my time on something more interesting, not on the implementation details. The problem is that I have to take care of it myself, if I want it to be done properly (and that's true as well in other fields than software, of course). Disclaimer: still a student (although nearly graduated). I won't bite you for having more experience than I do :) And the phrasing here might be a little provocative on purpose, don't take it too hard please.
  - hsikka 9y ago
    Well said!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - partycoder 9y ago
    I strongly disagree. First, you assume that AI will remain less proficient than humans, and therefore suitable only for grunt work. Artificial intelligence has many advantages over us, and this is often overlooked. - How much time does it take to train one software engineer? decades worth of time. Once you have one, what does it get another? about the same amount of time and money. In contrast, once you train one AI based engineer, the time to get the second one is about the time of serializing the state of one and deploying it multiple times. You could recruit and discard AI engineers on demand for whatever you need. - They won't sleep, take breaks for lunch or coffee, get distracted, waste time talking about their car, vacations, wine tasting and other stupid things. They will just work. 24 hours a day. No breaks. - They won't consume information at a rate of 200 to 1000 words per minute, they won't be limited by their visual field, or how fast can they type. They may not even communicate using words, just transfer thoughts directly among them, or even entire trained neural ensembles. Plus, once they learn something that may affect they collectively rather than individually. - They will be aggressively supervised, ranked. Then, since their generations are shorter, this will cause them to continuously improve at a much faster pace than humans. If this happens, the need for having the same amount of human engineers will be lower if not zero. Some people may argue that the human brain has billions of neurons and synaptic connections. Sure. But which portion of that is actively used in developing software? remove motor functions, autonomous functions like regulating heart rate, respiration and such and you are left with much less.
sgt101 9y ago
Who will write the specs that cause the code to be generated? oh...

mikeshi42 9y ago

But then we can finally spend _all_ of our time on HN! But we really do think ML, even in the near future, will automate some of our jobs away (and that's a good thing!), if you're interested in some of our thoughts on that: https://medium.com/modeldepot/we-previously-talked-about-how-transfer-learning-will-radically-change-ml-c4fed21a65a2 https://medium.com/modeldepot/we-previously-talked-about-how...

MayeulC 9y ago
I was about to answer roughly the same. If someone could step up and "take my job", it would free me up for other things. I would be grad to be able to rely on a good "software engineer" model to build the next generation tooling. All in all, more performance, more efficiency, improving our tools bottom-up, going for the low hanging fruit first, to free us from the less interesting tasks. Isn't it what we always do and always did? If a task is repetitive or deterministic, I always feel like I could be spending my time on something more interesting, not on the implementation details. The problem is that I have to take care of it myself, if I want it to be done properly (and that's true as well in other fields than software, of course). Disclaimer: still a student (although nearly graduated). I won't bite you for having more experience than I do :) And the phrasing here might be a little provocative on purpose, don't take it too hard please.
- hsikka 9y ago
  Well said!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- partycoder 9y ago
  I strongly disagree. First, you assume that AI will remain less proficient than humans, and therefore suitable only for grunt work. Artificial intelligence has many advantages over us, and this is often overlooked. - How much time does it take to train one software engineer? decades worth of time. Once you have one, what does it get another? about the same amount of time and money. In contrast, once you train one AI based engineer, the time to get the second one is about the time of serializing the state of one and deploying it multiple times. You could recruit and discard AI engineers on demand for whatever you need. - They won't sleep, take breaks for lunch or coffee, get distracted, waste time talking about their car, vacations, wine tasting and other stupid things. They will just work. 24 hours a day. No breaks. - They won't consume information at a rate of 200 to 1000 words per minute, they won't be limited by their visual field, or how fast can they type. They may not even communicate using words, just transfer thoughts directly among them, or even entire trained neural ensembles. Plus, once they learn something that may affect they collectively rather than individually. - They will be aggressively supervised, ranked. Then, since their generations are shorter, this will cause them to continuously improve at a much faster pace than humans. If this happens, the need for having the same amount of human engineers will be lower if not zero. Some people may argue that the human brain has billions of neurons and synaptic connections. Sure. But which portion of that is actively used in developing software? remove motor functions, autonomous functions like regulating heart rate, respiration and such and you are left with much less.

sgt101 9y ago

Who will write the specs that cause the code to be generated? oh...