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AI Programming Robotics

Jack Dorsey Tells Andrew Yang: 'AI is Coming For Programming Jobs' (cnbc.com) 211

Posted by EditorDavid from the developing-developers dept.
An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: The rise of artificial intelligence will make even software engineers less sought after. That's because artificial intelligence will soon write its own software, according to Jack Dorsey, the tech billionaire boss of Twitter and Square. And that's going to put some beginning-level software engineers in a tough spot.

"We talk a lot about the self-driving trucks in and whatnot" when discussing how automation will replace jobs held by humans, Dorsey told former Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang on an episode of the "Yang Speaks" podcast published Thursday. But A.I. "is even coming for programming" jobs, Dorsey said.

"A lot of the goals of machine learning and deep learning is to write the software itself over time so a lot of entry-level programming jobs will just not be as relevant anymore," Dorsey told Yang.
Dorsey also told Yang that he belives a Universal Basic Income could give workers "peace of mind" that they'll be able to "eat and feed their children while they are learning how to transition into this new world."
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Jack Dorsey Tells Andrew Yang: 'AI is Coming For Programming Jobs' More

Jack Dorsey Tells Andrew Yang: 'AI is Coming For Programming Jobs'

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  • Entry level jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thereitis ( 2355426 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:38AM (#60098750) Journal

    You need people to start in entry level jobs so they can progress to intermediate and senior level roles. Where will those experienced people come from once the population ages out?

    • You need people to start in entry level jobs so they can progress to intermediate and senior level roles. Where will those experienced people come from once the population ages out?

      A lot of people start in entry level jobs and remain there for their whole careers.

      Others can become intermediate and senior pretty damn quick.

      Assuming AI does really start to master software dev (a big 'if' in the near term) there's still going to be some work for talented but less experienced developers, but the level of minimum competency required for someone to be effective is going to keep rising.

      The other part of that is if software gets easier to write is also gets cheaper, which means people will bu

    • Re:Entry level jobs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:56AM (#60098848)

      I'm posting AC because my username gives away my real name and I'm about to say things that could reflect negatively on employers of mine - past and present.

      I agree with you and I have no interest in "gate keeping." However, I really want the barrier to entry to be higher than it is today.

      I worked for a consulting agency that chased "big fish" clients and would bill them through the nose. Some consultants charge by the hour - which is probably a fairer model (though that can be cheated too) - but this client billed per day per head. That incentivized them to pad teams with as many extremely-wet-behind-the-ears bootcamp devs as they could. As long as there was one or two experienced architects to the carry the team, they could completely rape the client on invoices. When those experienced engineers complained that they were doing all the work on top of trying to train these juniors, the response was exactly what you just said: "How are they supposed to learn if we don't give them a chance?"

      This company even founded a bootcamp of their own in order to recruit these people who had no business being employed (YET). Many had potential and I wish every single one of them the best success as their careers progress. I just think that we were doing a disservice to our clients, a disservice to the more experienced engineers and possibly a disservice to those juniors as well because burnout is real and no one wants to feel out of their depth.

      I also say this as someone who LOVES to teach. I get a tremendous amount of reward from passing my knowledge on to the next generation of devs. I enjoy training juniors. I just want them to come in a little bit more prepared than we are currently accepting.

      I never went to college. I taught myself to program in the 90s starting with Basic, then I wanted to learn C/C++ and, needing tools and compilers but having no money, someone suggested I look into Linux and my life was forever changed. Back then we didn't have udemy and Youtube and the Internet that we have today. I learned from books, open source communities and a hell of a lot of trial and error and crappy little games that I would write. I wonder how much my journey would have been expedited had I had access to stackoverflow, github and the abundance of online courses that we have today.

      If AI can increase the barrier of entry, then that will mean that people will have to work just a little bit harder before someone will be willing to pay them high salaries for not being competent. It will mean that intermediate and experienced devs won't have to feel as often like they're carrying the weight of others. It will mean that consultants won't be able to swindle their clients as much by padding teams with heads that aren't really doing much.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ranton ( 36917 )

        If AI can increase the barrier of entry, then that will mean that people will have to work just a little bit harder before someone will be willing to pay them high salaries for not being competent.

        AI won't magically make them work harder, if it raises the barrier of entry it would just reduce the number of developers overall. There is already significantly more reward for those who exit college with marketable skills compared to average college / boot camp graduates, so any incentives are already there. We simply don't have enough people who can meet those standards.

        And being able to meet those standards is a hard thing. Time doesn't have that much to do with it either in my opinion. Most of the peop

        • if it raises the barrier of entry it would just reduce the number of developers overall.

          It is far more likely that AI will lower the barriers to entry.

          An AI system that looks at code and recognizes patterns that may be errors or non-portable or violate coding standards, would help entry-level coders to be more productive and learn faster.

          I use Grammarly to help me write English text. It catches errors and suggests better phrasing. A "Grammarly for code" may do the same for programmers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Simple: more time in school.

      The number of years of schooling is have been increasing everywhere in the world, which no sign of stopping.
      https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]

      Of course, school is not real life experience. But although I don't have any hard data to back it up, it looks schools and private companies are more and more connected. It is often criticized as companies are essentially asking schools to make better employees instead of focusing on general education, but it is a way to bridge the gap when

    • If you haven't noticed, Corporate Earth doesn't value 'experience' anymore because 'experience' is 'expensive'; they'd rather force out all the 'experienced' people so they can cut their bottom line, then hire wet-behind-the-ears kids with zero experience fresh out of college who haven't had their Quarter Life Crisis yet, who are so grateful to have any job that actually pays that they'll take a pittance with shit benefits just to get hired. More than just programming jobs, too, engineering jobs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The question is what those jobs look like. In the long ago, as documented in The Mythical Man Minth among other books, the entry level jobs were about developing solutions for common problems and writing several lines of assembly to code it. Management was learning how to manage so that adding a new person to team did not actually decrease productivity.

      Twenty five years ago entry level people were fleshing out hand rolled web servers and ERP systems. We were testing and deploying load manage to software

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      You need people to start in entry level jobs so they can progress to intermediate and senior level roles. Where will those experienced people come from once the population ages out?

      While I'm not a huge fan of the consulting industry, one thing they do well is provide a large number of entry level jobs. I have worked mostly for medium sized companies, and we rarely have much use for junior developers. I usually will only have a few employees with expertise in any given technology stack, and work which can be done by junior employees is often sparse. And what they can do generally requires more supervision than is worth the cost of paying the junior employee.

      There is a big tragedy of th

  • It can only mean one thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe2020 ( 6760092 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:41AM (#60098768)

    It's time to start developing AIs that supervise other AIs to make bosses, managers and directors redundant.

    • Re:It can only mean one thing (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:42PM (#60099068) Journal
      From what I've seen over the course of my work life, most bosses and other paper-shufflers could be replaced with interpreted BASIC programs, consisting mostly of DATA and PRINT statements, and of course infinite loops.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. While it is true that most programmers are mediocre or bad, most "managers" are just bad. Keep the 10% good ones and you are all set. Problem with that is that many CEOs and other C-levels clearly are in the "bad" class and they will never fire themselves for incompetence, as richly deserved as that would be.

    • They can be trained on the vast archive of Dilbert comic strips.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      To be honest, I think that managers and directors will be replaced by AIs well before programming jobs.

      At least middle management. Top level managers are likely to stay, for the big decisions and investment, and so are low level manager, as representatives for the rest of the team. But middle management, whose goal is mostly to monitor the situation, allocate budgets, and manage human resources can be "helped" a lot by algorithms. In fact it is already happening, to the point that an automated system may fi

    • You're joking, but my group just won a grant to research/write AI that will explain what other AIs are doing. Seriously, you can't come up with this shit even if you tried.

      • You're joking, but my group just won a grant to research/write AI that will explain what other AIs are doing. Seriously, you can't come up with this shit even if you tried.

        I admit, it was a bit of a knee-jerk response... I don't think developers are all going to get made redundant, some yes, when a company is bad at managing their workforce. Anyway, we are still at the start of AIs and let them do singular tasks, but it will come to the point where we use AIs to manage AIs, because of the time it takes to train them will we need more than faster hardware, but we need to find ways to take shortcuts in software and still get the result we want.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      I'd start there. As someone with a successful career in software engineering, my success stems from my ability to understand the business model of my company and to translate the inane ramblings of my manager into software. Until AI can do that, I'm not terribly concerned about my job. When AI can do that, my manager and I will both be out of a job, as will most of the rest of humanity, I'm sure.

  • Most programming jobs have already been eliminated.

    It used to be that you needed to program computers by entering the ones and zeroes manually. Then compilers were invented so that you simply enter a few instructions about what you wanted the computer to do and then the compiler actually created the program.

    • Re:Compilers already eliminated most programming j (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:58AM (#60098856) Journal
      Ultimately someone will have to decide and document what the program should do, and that person will be called a programmer.

      • Re:Compilers already eliminated most programming j (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thereitis ( 2355426 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:17PM (#60098934) Journal

        That's right, we still need the specification in some form. If any AI writes the code, then the specification complexity just increases to the point where it is so meticulously detailed that you may as well have had a human write the code.
        Either that, or you can have "AI"s (term used loosely) produce cookie-cutter apps that have a well defined set of input parameters. But then it's just a fancy templating system.

        • If any AI writes the code, then the specification complexity just increases to the point where it is so meticulously detailed that you may as well have had a human write the code.
          Either that, or you can have "AI"s (term used loosely) produce cookie-cutter apps that have a well defined set of input parameters. But then it's just a fancy templating system.

          Will AI every be able to write code, in terms of producing source code? Or is this speculation that the code functionality will be replaced by AI systems? I'm not sure a path to the former for appreciably complex code has been yet demonstrated. If it's the latter, then isn't this simply the continuation of the evolution that we've seen for decades, where automation replaces the simpler and more rote human activities and human activities move up the software stack, including creating yet higher abstractio

        • It seems like if you specify things narrowly enough you already have the source code! You don't need AI, you just need a compiler.

      • Re: Compilers already eliminated most programming (Score:5, Interesting)

        by javaman235 ( 461502 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:28PM (#60099000)

        That is precisely true, but the reality is that person will be called a mathematician. I have thought a lot about this one theoretically, and what it must come down to is someone generating a program such that x,y,z, and the x,y,z the program satisfies are mathematical translations of the customers wishes. Only with pretty trivial stuff like vanity websites will AI be able to translate customer wishes straight to product.

        • So basically you are saying that Prolog is the language of the future?

        • But that's not how programming works. The point of having higher level programming languages is precisely to avoid having programming be math. At the bottom level it's all just binary mathematics. But we create abstraction systems to avoid the programmer having to spend their time doing that.

          If you follow only the existing trends in programming you will EVENTUALLY get to the point where programs are being written by software, given a functional description in your language of choice. I realize that this has

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by lgw ( 121541 )

            If you follow only the existing trends in programming you will EVENTUALLY get to the point where programs are being written by software, given a functional description in your language of choice.

            That's called "a compiler", by the way, the bit that writes the software given a functional description. People seem to be unclear on this, for some reason. The part of software development that is the actual job is setting down a specification unambiguously in some sort of language. The hard part is "unambiguously", not "language".

            The only real question to be asked is how long it's going to take for most programmers to be replaced with software.

            This has happened continuously throughout the past 50 years or so. The tools get better, and whatever was the tedious repetitive part 20 years ago is done by software today,

        • Uh, no. Mathematicians suck at any real application of Math. That's why we have Physics, Biology, Chemistry. and wide variety of Engineering fields. Go look at the code a Math PhD writes, it's abysmal. Mathematically flawless yet horribly implemented.
    • You clearly have never spent any serious time writing any software, friend.
      I've never even been a professional programmer, but I've spend serious time writing code in the past, and could do it again if I saw the need -- and my experience goes all the way back to the 'entering ones and zeroes manually', both in the COSMAC ELF microcomputer trainer I built as a 15 year old, and the IMSAI 8080 I used to own back in the day -- and then Macro Assemblers and 'C' compilers. So I think I'm at least qualified to sa

    • Back when programming was lower-level and more difficult, there were fewer programming jobs. Demand for programmers was lower.

      When higher-level compilers (like, FORTRAN, COBOL, C etc) hit the market, the result was an increase in the demand for programmers.

      This is commonly observed in economics: technology that increases the efficiency with which a resource (including human resources) can be utilized results in an increased demand for said resource. Also, when the cost of something goes down, demand tends

    • Did they? So far, the compilers along with better hardware just expanded what you could do. Now that it's possible to write more advanced applications with high level languages, they hire more programmers and do exactly that.

      It's not like farming where automation really did replace workers. You generally don't plow or plant in some fancy new way because of automation, you just do it with fewer workers. Compilers, OTOH, opened up whole new ways of doing things, as if it were now possible to plow the sky

  • No, it won't (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:53AM (#60098832)

    While you can easily use AI to replace grunt coding tasks and established models - these things already exist in the form of "automated programming tools" that generate the code from some basic configuration settings.

    The problem is these tools only work for the one task/framework these were set for. if you deviate from that path (EG by being creative) the tool breaks down and/or more commonly the tool is just overrun by newer processes, methods and techniques.

    Further we've tried going down this road multiple times before. Everybody seems to have forgotten Rational Rose which was a tool where you "wrote code" using UML shapes and diagrams resulting in automated code generation of in the language of YOUR CHOICE with no coding needed. Which, as anybody who's used the tool will tell you, is BS.

    That doesn't mean AI can't do code generation - good lord, as a cloud programmer i would kill right now to have an AI to autogenerate cloudformation scripts for me (and those are known quantifies). You can even get an AI to write "Hello world" - but you're not going to get a Star Trek Utopian AI where you say "Hey, Siri, write me a AAA video game that I can sell for ONE MILLION DOLLARS"

    • We had something that did up BPML into an ETL XML format that ran on a Java OSGI modular system. It was actually quite robust. Rational Rose was... alright-ish, but yeah it oversold the hype biggly. But hey the same crew worked on the PCML for service programs on the System i and PCML has been banging for COBOL and RPGLE based services to bring them into a web container. So, yeah, their idea wasn't more hype than product but they did go on to do some pretty neat stuff. I recently moved some logic built

    • I'm rather old-school; seems to me that 'grunt coding tasks' can be handled by copy-and-paste from your personal library of code you've been writing for years and years.
  • This is more billionaire crap. Once everyone is on their favorite plan to eliminate the class mobility Jack n his other billionaire pals will be locked in at the top of the pyramid forever.

    UBI is a pro-billionaire lock-in fantasy scheme built on fear.

  • AI will likely do jack ... (Score:3)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:57AM (#60098854)

    All "AI" has ever done is create a massive bubbles, slightly improve the state of the art in signal processing and classification and then collapse. Assuming technological civilization survives long enough eventually it will create true AI, will this time be the one? Doubtful.

    But hey, the slight improvement in classification is nicely timed to coincide with the increase in mass surveillance ... so at least this time the investors in the bubble will see a bit better return on investment.

    • Computing has made rent seeking in the form of skimming a few cents off of transactions here and there immensely profitable. Our current system for insuring medicine is proof of this.
    • Companies have invested millions and billions thinking this 'AI' stuff would be Just Another Development Cycle, only to find that they can't get it across the finish line because no one has any idea how 'thinking' or 'reasoning' even works in a living brain. Guess they thought that the 'million monkeys' approach to development might produce something by accident that they could market and get rich off of. As-is they now hand it over to their marketing departments, who spam the media, to try convince everyon

  • fat chance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theJavaMan ( 539177 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:00PM (#60098872)

    Smart humans can barely code. An AI that can code as well as a human would be a threat to our species' existence, and not some rich guy's money making device.

    More Silicon Valley microdosing nonsense.

  • Once we have replicators we wont need cooks! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:02PM (#60098878)

    Maybe someone with more knowledge of AI development can correct me, but this seems so far out in the future to be meaningless to make policy about today. Among all the jobs that will be threatened by automation I cannot imagine programming and software development are anywhere near being replaced (and I am not a programmer myself). I strongly suspect AI will play a large part in how programmers work and there will be integration into programmers development environments and tool-sets. That will make programmers more efficient and productive, but not put them out of work. With the difficulty that has come with teaching an AI to drive a car having one develop and efficient well thought out software application, especially one that would be used by humans is decades away. Much less all the programming work needed to build and maintain those AI's.

    • I don't think we'll have any so-called 'AI' doing 'creative' jobs for anyone until we have full-on human-level general AI that can actually think and reason like a human being and preferably that you can talk to in a normal manner so you can discuss things with it -- but I'd say we're at least 50 years away from anything even close to that because we haven't got a clue currently how 'thinking' or 'reasoning' even works in a biological brain and won't for quite some time to come. May not even be possible to

      • I'd say we're at least 50 years away from anything even close to that because we haven't got a clue currently how 'thinking' or 'reasoning' even works in a biological brain and won't for quite some time to come. May not even be possible to create a machine that can do what our brains can do for all we know.

        The amount of computation required using current methods is staggering. It takes data center sized computers to emulate a worm's 80-neuron brain, let alone the umptillions of neurons in a sapiens sapiens brain.

        However, we are much closer than 50 years. There are 2 known solutions to this paradox: the first is quantum computing, which I personally think is a pipe dream or certainly more than 50 years off. The second is borg-like technology. We can already do it invasively but I believe EEG technology can a

    • Kurzweil estimates this will happen sometime around 2070-2080. So programmers are safe for a while.

  • When you can spend $1M a month on AWS compute resources to write your boilerplate copypaste software projects?

    • Quality, maybe???

    • Java devs at my company make six times that or more, and we do have Azure cloud project going. That has quite a few devs plus project manager, DBA... seems to me it's making work not replacing people. All my life IT has been giving people jobs, almost all jobs at my employer involve a computer as a tool, and then we need people to maintain and deploy the tools, the infrastructure....

      Not seeing this B.S. where automation costs jobs, except in nonsense studies that aren't really counting all the jobs the

  • It's the level of abstraction, stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:05PM (#60098894) Homepage Journal

    Anyone remember "automatic programming"? Or some of the talk about anyone being able to program in COBOL because it was so much like English? Old ideas, but maybe they were just too early and now the times have ripened.

    My own label was "level of abstraction". It keeps going up, and what that means is you can get more actual work done with fewer lines of code. Or you can think of it in qualitative terms of changing the kinds of problems you can solve with apps. People don't even want to call them programs anymore. The focus is on what it does, whereas in "the old days" the focus was on getting it to run at all. (But if it was a REAL program the debugging never ended!)

    From the AI perspective, I don't see it as a general AI thing. A good IDE is more of a special-purpose AI, and we're becoming extremely good at building those. If we can define a human skill clearly enough, from playing chess to ping pong, then we can build a computer to do it better. So far programming has been more of an art than a science, but if you change your level of abstraction again, maybe that isn't true for most programs these days. Lots of "daily use", even "one off" programs that solve interesting problems these days.

    Recent anecdote. I have a little database with two relational tables. I decided I wanted to do a new kind of analysis on it. I spent a couple of days considering algorithms, but for a long time all of the algorithms appeared to be O(n^2), which looked nasty, so I didn't even start programming. Then I figured out a better algorithm that was O(n), but I realized I could just do that with a simple spreadsheet. Painting the numbers got the results I was seeking without really needing to uncoil the Python at all. (But the results turned out to be rather disappointing, even boring.)

    "Times, they are a changing." I think we need to completely rethink economics in terms of time. Unfortunately conventional economists insist on prattling on about money because they think they can measure it, while time is much trickier. Time = money is a lie. The not-so-new reality is time >> money.

    Metacomment on ye olde FP problem: I deliberately wrote this comment with the intention of stimulating an actual discussion of some actual social problems, but that took a couple of minutes. There were already two twatshots posted when I started, and there's been time for half a dozen more. If one of the objectives of discussions on Slashdot is to make people think about the stories, then I think those kinds of comments should go to hell or Twitter, whichever is worse.

    • If time >> money then we wouldn't still have hourly wage workers. Companies that converted to uh what? would kick ass over their hourly wage competition and crush them all.

    • Anyone remember... the talk about anyone being able to program in COBOL because it was so much like English?

      No, though I don't doubt some moron writing for some magazine said something that dumb.

      What I do remember reading about in the history books was people claiming that COBOL was so much like English that an accounting manager could learn to automate tasks with it, and a stock broker could learn to use it too.

      Educated professionals expected to be in the upper half of the competency curve for their profession, but who are not normally computer people. That is who was supposed to be able to learn to write it. No

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      Metacomment on ye olde FP problem: I deliberately wrote this comment with the intention of stimulating an actual discussion of some actual social problems, but that took a couple of minutes. There were already two twatshots posted when I started, and there's been time for half a dozen more. If one of the objectives of discussions on Slashdot is to make people think about the stories, then I think those kinds of comments should go to hell or Twitter, whichever is worse.

      I read all your post, and none of the trolls, and I found your post valuable and it was highly voted. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I found value in it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kbahey ( 102895 )

      Anyone remember "automatic programming"? Or some of the talk about anyone being able to program in COBOL because it was so much like English? Old ideas, but maybe they were just too early and now the times have ripened.

      Yeah, and SQL was supposed to be a tool where people with little programming experience (managers) could use to produce reports without needing to go to the Information Systems (IS) department ...

      How well did that work out?

      Hell, even today, we have DEVELOPERS who write queries that join 8 tab

  • After decades of computer programming, how much closer are we to the point where the programmer can spend a great deal more time thinking about architecture of a program than coding?

    Not really that far at all.

    I would LOVE for AI to come along and replace the most tedious aspects of programming, but so far it can't even do that well.

    Where AI could really shine is in assisting programmers, I wonder if the reason it has not advanced more is they are tarting replacement rather than assistance...

    • You really want the half-assed excuse for 'AI' they keep trotting out to everyone to be writing the bulk of your code for you? Seriously? You'd probably spend more time debugging the nonsense output from the damned thing than you would just writing it yourself.

      • You really want the half-assed excuse for 'AI' they keep trotting out to everyone to be writing the bulk of your code for you?

        I want a competent version of that, that I feel like is possible but we have not seen yet.

        I want to see fully-assed coding AI, I ag ree I want none of the half-assed stuff we have seen to date (which is why I pretty much always avoid code generators too).

      • You'd probably spend more time debugging the nonsense output from the damned thing than you would just writing it yourself.

        That would be true if they were using some sort of expert system, but they're just "training" a black box. You're not going to debug shit. Life is not that simple if a mainstream contemporary AI wrote your code.

    • I can't even DO architecture anymore. I use to labor for days over design, code layout and how to setup the objects for C++ so the design would just fall into place. As a cloud programmer now doing severless microservices my choices are javascript or python and slathering some scripting code onto an IDE to make a few calls. I can still get some structure in there which makes my code better organized and adaptable but that's only a few minutes of thought (if that).

      More of your architecture/design is pulle

    • After decades of computer programming, how much closer are we to the point where the programmer can spend a great deal more time thinking about architecture of a program than coding?

      I spend way more time on architecture than implementation, or testing. 90% of a quality solution that won't require continuous updates is architecture.

      I think they call it "waterfall process." Plan first, then do. If you need to make a change, stop; change the plan to include the change before trying to make the change. Start over if necessary to implement the new plan correctly.

      The process works for roads and bridges, too; in fact, in structural engineering planning is mandatory! (Golly, I wonder why! /s)

  • Seriously, folks, they both need to shut the fuck up. Spewing nonsense, spreading FUD. Just knock it the hell off already!
    What do they think they're accomplishing? We're still in the middle of the Crisis of the Century, too many people are down to one badly-frayed nerve, we're approaching record levels of national unemployment, and this rich jackass and his jackass buddy are spreading around more "robots are going to take all your jobs!" bullshit? Really!?

    Yelling "FIRE!!!" in a crowded theatre showing the original Invastion of the Body Snatchers (with the original ending that frightened people half to death)

    Someone should punch this Dorsey character in the

  • Never Stated: AI Will Replace Management (Score:5, Insightful)

    by YetAnotherDrew ( 664604 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:25PM (#60098984)
    Much of management is about coordinating activities, monitoring, reporting, and deciding based on future predictions. All of that is known as "data-driven decision-making," the thing we're all supposed to be doing that somehow lends itself to automation. This is a natural fit for AI. The best place for AI is in the C suite. But execs can't talk about feeling threatened because we'd all laugh at them. So instead, they stoke fear about every other segment of society.

    • But execs can't talk about feeling threatened ...

      Well, they don't have to talk about it, because they are the ones doing the threatening and they know how to respond to it. But that too is what AIs can do, and are already doing in some gaming bots. Threat management is just another task for AIs really.

      Nobody then likes it when jobs are being made redundant and Jack Dorsey is just stating more or less the obvious. Because once AIs can make people redundant will some companies not simply assign these people to new tasks, which is the obvious thing to do, an

    • Because like 60% of management is dealing with interpersonal issues on your team.

  • as it fixes Twitter, right Jack?

  • AI coming? (Score:3)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday May 24, 2020 @02:23PM (#60099470) Journal
    I believe we'll have nuclear fusion before real AI...

  • The problem with this proposal is that most specs I've seen for was an application should do are unreasonable and unworkable. You need to talk to the person/people requiring the work and find out what they really want rather than what they tell you off the top of their head. After you get that pinned down, then I guess it's theoretically possible for an AI to do it if anyone could (and that isn't always possible).

    There's more than one reason for the joke about the "do what I mean" instruction.

  • Well, not the AI part. but I remember how in the early 80 at school how by 2000, we would have to make up jobs so that we could feel useful and people would have fake jobs. :D
    Well, all that has happened are that complexity the speed of development of everything has gone up.
    In the programming world, very few are doing opcode programming anymore, we keep adding layers of what we are doing and we will keep doing that.

  • It isn't just robots that have replaced workers. AI's have already been replacing workers in jobs for years. I personally know of one company that laid off thousands of workers after replacing them with AI (NDA applies). People used to joke about replacing their job with a 7 line perl script. Turns out that some of those people are now actually working really hard to do just that - and succeeding.

    Here's the rub, as people get better at automating simple jobs they will gain the skills required for slightly h

  • AI is anything but precise and efficient. There is no room for error when writing code and AI is known for errors. I am skeptical we're anywhere near ready for AI taking even basic programming jobs. Programming is not about computer science, but about taking human workflows and documenting them precisely enough for a machine to replicate them.

    I have seen the performance of AI for computer security and attack analysis. It is a great supplement, but not a replacement for something built by humans. I think people don't realize the limits of AI. AI can't even 100% detect dicks and breasts in profile photos...how will it understand business requirements? 95% of my job doesn't involve writing code or syntax, but figuring out what to write and working through the edge cases. Java is not a productivity killer for me, life and business are. 95% of my day is figuring out what to write, not how to write it. Even with perfect AI, I'd still have to do 95% of that work.

    I am confident business programming jobs are not going anywhere in 20 years.

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