Is it possible for computers to eventually eliminate the need for programming? If so, what would happen to programmers?

Until some day when we have true artificial intelligence, computers won’t program themselves. What we have today is AI tools that are very helpful to human programmers. And that is likely to continue to improve. What we don’t have yet is a system that can understand the novel requirements of, say a new payroll system, and write it from scratch.

Computers are dumb machines. Very fast. But totally dumb. Without programming a computer just has a blinking light or blinking cursor and does nothing.

A computer is like a player piano that makes beautiful music. Without the music roll of paper with punched holes which tell the piano which notes to play, the player piano is just a dumb machine that does nothing. The genius isn’t in the player piano but in the music roll. (Well, some genius and creativity went into creation of the machine.)

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Even today’s AI systems are not intelligent. They can reproduce code, even with modifications, based on what they’ve been trained on, on the internet. None of that code from an AI is novel. It may seem novel to you, simply because you may not have seen it before.

One day when AI can replace programmers, we programmers will no longer have to work. AI will eventually replace all human jobs and no humans will have to work. That transition is likely to be quite a mess. Maybe a robot tax. What happens to truck drivers when trucks drive themselves?

Humans, who have intelligence, write programs for dumb computers to make them do useful things. It requires an intelligent agent to write programs. Computers don’t just magically program themselves. Just as it takes an intelligent agent to write music rolls for a player piano. The player piano doesn’t write its own music.

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Computers are the first machines in human history with sufficient complexity to be programmed to simulate certain aspects of human intelligence. All such efforts are called Artificial Intelligence or AI. There have been many programs written for decades which are AI. However recently what has gotten much attention is Machine Learning or more specifically Deep Learning.