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Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its

Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery. Whoever wrote this article has negative knowledge about the state of AI. edit: Its also slightly insulting that this person thinks that the modern programmer spends all their time writing if/else/then statement.

nxzero 10y ago
>> "Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery." (Years from now) ..."humans can learn to be surgeons, but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to do surgery." For example: http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/medical-robots/autonomous-robot-surgeon-bests-human-surgeons-in-world-first http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/medical-robot...
pcarolan 10y ago
Agreed. When Spotify stops putting Coldplay in my Radiohead station, I'll begin to worry.
pedalpete 10y ago
I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O and data manipulation tasks. Put something into a database, get something out of a database. Front-enders are doing layout, animation, sizing and colouring. The average modern programmer doesn't spend their time writing if/else/then statements, I believe the average programmer spends their time writing GET/SET/EDIT/DELETE flows. I believe in the next 10 years, artificial intelligence will be able to model and create these basic systems based on human input. UX and possibly even UI can also be trained. A/B testing can certainly be trained. Those who think programmers can't be replaced begin to sound like the Luddites who felt the loom could not match the quality of their craft. Note: I am a full-stack developer, I believe 90% of my day job will be replaced by AI in the coming years. That final 10% often deciding what to do or the best how, will likely be the main task.
- tikhonj 10y ago
  I did a bit of research in program synthesis, which is probably the closest academic field to this sort of thing (albeit in the realm of programming languages rather than AI/ML). I have two main conclusions: • Current methods to generate programs fundamentally do not scale. Most practical research is about how to extend small-scale synthesis systems to large-scale problems, rather than synthesizing large programs outright. • The best way to scale these systems is to make them more interactive. Let the programmer do what's easy for humans and use synthesis for the parts easy to automate. This is another way of saying that program synthesis is less about fully automatic programming and more about (radically) better development tools. I am confident that we will not have automatic programming systems that can handle non-trivial programs by themselves in the next 10/20 years, barring the sort of paradigm-shifting breakthroughs we can't really predict. Instead, we will have systems that can generate some amount of code and work in tandem with programmers—perhaps through sketching[1], programming by demonstration or just much-improved Intellisense. The current trajectory is that programming is to become easier, not obsolete. The result will not be fewer programmers but more programmers, largely because people with less expertise will be able to become programmers: think Jevons Paradox[2] for programming. Programming as a job will change and people will certainly have to adapt, but the job as a whole is not going anywhere. [1]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/papers/thesis.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/papers/thesis.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Current program synthesis isn't that advanced. At least not compared to state of the art AI. Recently AI has proved it can beat expert humans at all perfect information games. Go has a ridiculously huge search space, but by using neural networks AIs can learn to narrow it down to a manageable size. Program synthesis is just like a perfect information game. You have a search space, a state, a set of goals, etc. You could theoretically make it into a board game, and have human experts challenge computers at it.
    - tikhonj 10y ago
tryitnow 10y ago
As someone else already pointed out we actually do have robots doing surgery. AIs are not dogs - that's a bad analogy. Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. A lot of businesses don't care so much about quality and craftsmanship - as long as their customers are stuck with them they're perfectly willing to ship the most minimal product they can get away with.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  We have humans using a very fancy robot (DaVinci) to do surgery. So far no AI has been given the knife.
- eellpp 10y ago
  > Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. There is already a big trend of automation albeit on the IT side and not on development. Where it used to take a separate IT team and developers and DB admins etc there is growing field of devOps with automation. Companies, especially startups are biting into this trend and vendors, especially Cloud vendors are spearheading this movement. If there is glare of possibility of automating the development, these vendors and companies would have been all over it. This behaviour is not seen, means that this a possibility that exists in distant future.

nxzero 10y ago

>> "Dogs can be made to learn things - doesn't mean we allow them do surgery." (Years from now) ..."humans can learn to be surgeons, but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to do surgery." For example: http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/medical-robots/autonomous-robot-surgeon-bests-human-surgeons-in-world-first http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/medical-robot...

pcarolan 10y ago

Agreed. When Spotify stops putting Coldplay in my Radiohead station, I'll begin to worry.

pedalpete 10y ago

I'm going to take the other side of this argument and suggest that we didn't create the dog and the limitations in the dogs abilities. I suspect that this will be difficult for the HN community to hear, but we must face the upcoming realities. Though I think the article may be assigning more abilities to AI than is actually feasible in our lifetimes, let us not forget that most back-end developers are doing basic I/O and data manipulation tasks. Put something into a database, get something out of a database. Front-enders are doing layout, animation, sizing and colouring. The average modern programmer doesn't spend their time writing if/else/then statements, I believe the average programmer spends their time writing GET/SET/EDIT/DELETE flows. I believe in the next 10 years, artificial intelligence will be able to model and create these basic systems based on human input. UX and possibly even UI can also be trained. A/B testing can certainly be trained. Those who think programmers can't be replaced begin to sound like the Luddites who felt the loom could not match the quality of their craft. Note: I am a full-stack developer, I believe 90% of my day job will be replaced by AI in the coming years. That final 10% often deciding what to do or the best how, will likely be the main task.

tikhonj 10y ago
I did a bit of research in program synthesis, which is probably the closest academic field to this sort of thing (albeit in the realm of programming languages rather than AI/ML). I have two main conclusions: • Current methods to generate programs fundamentally do not scale. Most practical research is about how to extend small-scale synthesis systems to large-scale problems, rather than synthesizing large programs outright. • The best way to scale these systems is to make them more interactive. Let the programmer do what's easy for humans and use synthesis for the parts easy to automate. This is another way of saying that program synthesis is less about fully automatic programming and more about (radically) better development tools. I am confident that we will not have automatic programming systems that can handle non-trivial programs by themselves in the next 10/20 years, barring the sort of paradigm-shifting breakthroughs we can't really predict. Instead, we will have systems that can generate some amount of code and work in tandem with programmers—perhaps through sketching[1], programming by demonstration or just much-improved Intellisense. The current trajectory is that programming is to become easier, not obsolete. The result will not be fewer programmers but more programmers, largely because people with less expertise will be able to become programmers: think Jevons Paradox[2] for programming. Programming as a job will change and people will certainly have to adapt, but the job as a whole is not going anywhere. [1]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/papers/thesis.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/papers/thesis.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Current program synthesis isn't that advanced. At least not compared to state of the art AI. Recently AI has proved it can beat expert humans at all perfect information games. Go has a ridiculously huge search space, but by using neural networks AIs can learn to narrow it down to a manageable size. Program synthesis is just like a perfect information game. You have a search space, a state, a set of goals, etc. You could theoretically make it into a board game, and have human experts challenge computers at it.
  - tikhonj 10y ago

tryitnow 10y ago

As someone else already pointed out we actually do have robots doing surgery. AIs are not dogs - that's a bad analogy. Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. A lot of businesses don't care so much about quality and craftsmanship - as long as their customers are stuck with them they're perfectly willing to ship the most minimal product they can get away with.

astazangasta 10y ago
We have humans using a very fancy robot (DaVinci) to do surgery. So far no AI has been given the knife.
eellpp 10y ago
> Right now development costs per head are sky high. If there's any way to cut that spend, you better believe executives will be all over it. There is already a big trend of automation albeit on the IT side and not on development. Where it used to take a separate IT team and developers and DB admins etc there is growing field of devOps with automation. Companies, especially startups are biting into this trend and vendors, especially Cloud vendors are spearheading this movement. If there is glare of possibility of automating the development, these vendors and companies would have been all over it. This behaviour is not seen, means that this a possibility that exists in distant future.