In the late 90s I was in an introduction class to programming in C. I kept making memory allocation mistakes that crashed the machine.
My mentor: "Don't worry, by the time you graduate, you don't have to program, the world will soon be modeling software".
We'd go from 3G languages to 4G and beyond.
That never happened. Three decades have passed and we still develop at an obscenely low abstraction level. If anything, complexity has increased.
At the end of the day though, the point of computing is that the machine does what we want. Expressing this via a programming language where very expensive humans write text files is not necessarily to last forever.
To me the much more interesting threat is regarding purpose. As AI becomes ever more capable, an increasing amount of things become pointless.
If using AI I have the power of 50 programmers at my fingertips, how could one possibly develop anything sustainable and unique? Anybody else can trivially make the same thing.
What would set something apart if effort no longer is a major factor? Creativity? Easy to just replicate/steal.
So even though there has been small incremental progress at most in the last 30 years and your mentor's predictions were wildly wrong about how much easier anything would become, you still think "AI" will give you the power of 50 programmers?
50 effectively becomes and unlimited amount as capability grows. If AI can match the capability of a single programmer, it would then be trivial to scale up. Although in that case the term programmer makes little sense.
My mentor: "Don't worry, by the time you graduate, you don't have to program, the world will soon be modeling software".
We'd go from 3G languages to 4G and beyond.
That never happened. Three decades have passed and we still develop at an obscenely low abstraction level. If anything, complexity has increased.
At the end of the day though, the point of computing is that the machine does what we want. Expressing this via a programming language where very expensive humans write text files is not necessarily to last forever.
To me the much more interesting threat is regarding purpose. As AI becomes ever more capable, an increasing amount of things become pointless.
If using AI I have the power of 50 programmers at my fingertips, how could one possibly develop anything sustainable and unique? Anybody else can trivially make the same thing.
What would set something apart if effort no longer is a major factor? Creativity? Easy to just replicate/steal.