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Well well.. Looks like someone has noticed we entered the Industrial Age some time ago! Have you heard about something called automation? Do you know who did,

Well well.. Looks like someone has noticed we entered the Industrial Age some time ago! Have you heard about something called automation? Do you know who did, and had to deal with it decades/ centuries ago? Every other type of workers. Farmers, metalsmiths, artisans, etc, etc. Everyone gradually moved to better jobs and now everyone agrees automation is great in the end, of course. Frankly, I’ve thought for some time that Software engineers are about the most luddite group around at this point, and I have no problems at all to say this on this website. Seriously, every other answer in this thread offers true and valuable insights, but as always, about everyone seems to thinks Software jobs should be “different” or “more safe” than the others for Some Reasons. Which, to me, it’s Doubly sad: for the reason that, at the beginning of computers (less than a century ago), the dream was Already to reach full automation. AI was Always the plan. What happened to that? Why are many software engineers the ones with most problems with it now? (To the point of denying that AI will ever replace large parts of their current daily job. Of course it will- which doesn’t mean it will replace us ofcourse, just like there’s still farmers around- but the job will be pretty different. And we should be the first to know) When did the annoying daily job of building boilerplate and knowing arcane syntax by heart become a career anyway, and an untouchable one at that? Of course it’s easy for me because I’m fairly young, but tbh the sooner we enter the mindset that our job will change Exactly how all the others have, the better… Sorry if this was ranty but I’ve followed these discussions for a while

dc-programmer 5y ago
You don’t see how someone might have a visceral reaction to the prospect of being automated out of a job? Especially for those people living in countries with weak or no social nets? Plus, for a lot of us programming as it’s done now is a big part of our identity, and it’s understandable how people might feel uncomfortable about something that casts uncertainty about our place in the future. The historical Luddites were not anti-tech. They were lashing out against automation reducing their status in society and financial security
- gregjor 5y ago
  I can understand a person taking seriously the possibility that they will lose their job to automation. I live in a country with a weak social safety net (United States). If programming is "a big part" of your identity, get help for that. People work to make money. We are all in charge of our career choices, and we should pay attention to changes that might affect our work future. Having been in the programming business for four decades I've had to pay attention to the possibility that my job would get outsourced overseas -- that was a big thing a couple of decades ago, though it never happened to me because I made sure my skills weren't easily outsourced overseas or fobbed off on juniors with less experience. Getting worried, feeling uncomfortable, having a "visceral reaction" won't do any good. Nor will trying to push back against progress. What will do some good is paying attention to actual trends that affect your career, and figure out what you can safely ignore (like AI writing production code anytime soon). Everyone who doesn't want to end up out of a job has to continually adjust their skills and career path. None of us has a guaranteed "place in the future," it's up to us to position ourselves for reasonably likely futures.
lamp_book 5y ago
> Which, to me, it’s Doubly sad: for the reason that, at the beginning of computers (less than a century ago), the dream was Already to reach full automation. AI was Always the plan. What happened to that? The goal of out right automation has been consistently taken backseat to the advances of augmentation - tracing back to Englebart's lab at Stanford vs. SAIL and all of the other AI research labs. One laid the foundation of personal computing, the other, umm, surely some important things, but nothing nearly as radical. It's a subtle difference between automation and augmentation. Both are rooted in eliminating labor, but that does not necessarily mean replacing people. Despite tools like compilers, databases, and frameworks having eliminated plenty of programmer labor, there are more programmers than ever. Very few need to write machine code or implement a b-tree though. Copilot and AlphaCode can easily be viewed as extension of that. Much like an IDE can fill in the blanks while refactoring, copilot can go and fetch a method implementation from the hive mind that's been written a thousand times before. Like you said, the end goal is automation, not writing software. Writing software isn't a goal in and of itself. Of course you could say these tools will reduce demand for software developers but you could have said that for just about any other advancement in our tooling. You could have called the top of the market for software and developers in the past several decades and you would have been wrong every single time. As our tools solve our existing problems, we focus on solving new ones, and as long as we have problems we'll need problem solvers.

dc-programmer 5y ago

You don’t see how someone might have a visceral reaction to the prospect of being automated out of a job? Especially for those people living in countries with weak or no social nets? Plus, for a lot of us programming as it’s done now is a big part of our identity, and it’s understandable how people might feel uncomfortable about something that casts uncertainty about our place in the future. The historical Luddites were not anti-tech. They were lashing out against automation reducing their status in society and financial security

gregjor 5y ago
I can understand a person taking seriously the possibility that they will lose their job to automation. I live in a country with a weak social safety net (United States). If programming is "a big part" of your identity, get help for that. People work to make money. We are all in charge of our career choices, and we should pay attention to changes that might affect our work future. Having been in the programming business for four decades I've had to pay attention to the possibility that my job would get outsourced overseas -- that was a big thing a couple of decades ago, though it never happened to me because I made sure my skills weren't easily outsourced overseas or fobbed off on juniors with less experience. Getting worried, feeling uncomfortable, having a "visceral reaction" won't do any good. Nor will trying to push back against progress. What will do some good is paying attention to actual trends that affect your career, and figure out what you can safely ignore (like AI writing production code anytime soon). Everyone who doesn't want to end up out of a job has to continually adjust their skills and career path. None of us has a guaranteed "place in the future," it's up to us to position ourselves for reasonably likely futures.

lamp_book 5y ago

> Which, to me, it’s Doubly sad: for the reason that, at the beginning of computers (less than a century ago), the dream was Already to reach full automation. AI was Always the plan. What happened to that? The goal of out right automation has been consistently taken backseat to the advances of augmentation - tracing back to Englebart's lab at Stanford vs. SAIL and all of the other AI research labs. One laid the foundation of personal computing, the other, umm, surely some important things, but nothing nearly as radical. It's a subtle difference between automation and augmentation. Both are rooted in eliminating labor, but that does not necessarily mean replacing people. Despite tools like compilers, databases, and frameworks having eliminated plenty of programmer labor, there are more programmers than ever. Very few need to write machine code or implement a b-tree though. Copilot and AlphaCode can easily be viewed as extension of that. Much like an IDE can fill in the blanks while refactoring, copilot can go and fetch a method implementation from the hive mind that's been written a thousand times before. Like you said, the end goal is automation, not writing software. Writing software isn't a goal in and of itself. Of course you could say these tools will reduce demand for software developers but you could have said that for just about any other advancement in our tooling. You could have called the top of the market for software and developers in the past several decades and you would have been wrong every single time. As our tools solve our existing problems, we focus on solving new ones, and as long as we have problems we'll need problem solvers.