It'll still be some time before programmers start losing jobs to AI coders. AlphaCode is impressive to be sure, but the real world is not made of toy problems. Deepmind is clearly making progress in terms of applying AI in ways that are not defined in narrow domains, but there's a lot of levels to this, and while AlphaCode might represent a graduation to the next level, comprehension of the wide variety of domains of the human marketplace, and the human motivations that define them, is still many levels higher.
What I could see happening is that engineers start to use tools like AlphaCode to solve tightly-defined coding problems faster and with fewer bugs than left to their own devices. But there's still two problems. The first is that the code generated by the AI still needs to be understandable, so that it can be fixed, refactored, or otherwise improved - and an AI that can make its code understandable (in the way that good human engineers do), or do the work of fixing/refactoring/improving other code is next-level. More importantly, as a long-time programmer, I can tell you the coding is the easy part. The hard part is understanding the problem your code is supposed to solve, understanding the tradeoffs between different approaches, and being able to negotiate with stakeholders about what the best approach is. It'll be a very long time before we're handing that domain off to an AI. Terren On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 1:17 PM Lawrence Crowell < [email protected]> wrote: > > Programmers putting programmers out of work. > > LC > > On Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 3:55:08 AM UTC-6 [email protected] > wrote: > >> The same people that made AlphaZero, the chess and GO playing superstar, >> and AlphaFold, the 3-D structure predicting program, have now come up with >> "AlphaCode", a computer program that writes other computer programs in C++ >> and Python. AlphaCode entered a programming competition with professional >> human programmers called "Codeforces" and ranked in the top 54%. Not bad >> for a first try, it seems like only yesterday computers could only play >> mediocre chess and now they play it at a superhuman level. I don't see why >> a program like this couldn't be used to improve its own programming, so I >> don't think the importance of this development can be overestimated. >> >> Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode >> <https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/AlphaCode/competition_level_code_generation_with_alphacode.pdf> >> >> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis >> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> >> aoz >> > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/bfbf9c0d-4df0-4ed7-9e58-ab8a68ded0e6n%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/bfbf9c0d-4df0-4ed7-9e58-ab8a68ded0e6n%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAMy3ZA8VUbFc9QHGLt2k5BP3kkc7gujU3emLVj5E4HgbV%2B-v9A%40mail.gmail.com.
