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> But they note that the boundaries of what counts as routine and non-routine are moving all the time. It was once thought that driving was a skill so complex i

> But they note that the boundaries of what counts as routine and non-routine are moving all the time. It was once thought that driving was a skill so complex it couldn’t be automated only to see it turned on its head by Google and others. What happens when programming becomes routine? I expect there will be a very scary moment when we all realize that someone with the right resources has discovered the right learning algorithm, before all of us plebes die.

Qantourisc 11y ago
At that point in time, the robot understand the real world well enough to implement it in software and make your software and real world exceptions match up. At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.
danso 11y ago
A lot of programming has become routine. Think of all the programming involved to build even a 1/10th of the functionality of what can be created, literally, in a single command. Yet anyone who is acquainted to programming and web dev would say that running the Rails generator does not obviate the use of programming. And for those who are relatively experienced, this automation is a huge benefit, allowing the programmer to focus on designing more features and expending more of their creative energy on non-routine work. In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Furthermore, the idea of the "one single algorithm" followed by extinction that the parent poster proposes is overly simplistic. Assuming the sheer level of interconnectedness and computational ubiquity where every conceivable piece of matter used by humans out there has a bus or exports a remote API for most of these far-fetched AGI apocalypse scenarios to work, it's probably wiser to worry about crippling cyberwar way before AGI is even a consideration.
logicallee 11y ago
This shouldn't be downvoted, it's a legitimate question: what if non-programmer domain experts had sufficient tools to program whatever they wanted done. This actually has happened on the cloud: no small sized organization needs to set up their own servers. Server maintenance has become literally done by robots. (Someone wrote a script, the script does the maintenance and abstracts the server hardware away from you.) In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.) I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.

Qantourisc 11y ago

At that point in time, the robot understand the real world well enough to implement it in software and make your software and real world exceptions match up. At this point it's basically "We welcome our computer overlords." and not only programming will be at risk.

danso 11y ago

A lot of programming has become routine. Think of all the programming involved to build even a 1/10th of the functionality of what can be created, literally, in a single command. Yet anyone who is acquainted to programming and web dev would say that running the Rails generator does not obviate the use of programming. And for those who are relatively experienced, this automation is a huge benefit, allowing the programmer to focus on designing more features and expending more of their creative energy on non-routine work. In other words, as some programming tasks becomes routine, many more non-routine tasks become available to us.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Furthermore, the idea of the "one single algorithm" followed by extinction that the parent poster proposes is overly simplistic. Assuming the sheer level of interconnectedness and computational ubiquity where every conceivable piece of matter used by humans out there has a bus or exports a remote API for most of these far-fetched AGI apocalypse scenarios to work, it's probably wiser to worry about crippling cyberwar way before AGI is even a consideration.

logicallee 11y ago

This shouldn't be downvoted, it's a legitimate question: what if non-programmer domain experts had sufficient tools to program whatever they wanted done. This actually has happened on the cloud: no small sized organization needs to set up their own servers. Server maintenance has become literally done by robots. (Someone wrote a script, the script does the maintenance and abstracts the server hardware away from you.) In programming languages, there has never been a push toward easy programming. Everyone thinks it's great to make people do useless work to become an expert before being able to achieve anything. Elegant, simple, obvious syntax like Python that is suitable for beginners makes programmers scowl: to the point that they would like to require users to learn a new non-obvious meaning for a semicolon, and put it at the end of each and every instruction they write. (Just one of many, many examples, other examples being library and package management, nature of error messages, interfaces, API's, etc etc etc. Everything is about making things harder, to the point that you would be mistaken for thinking that "require user to spend more than 15 seconds interacting with documentation before achieving what is obvious and easy using our solution" is a design requirement.) I would say that a lot of programmers could program their job out of existence if they wanted to.