How do you train a former middle manager at an auto factory or an assembly line worker to become a competent software engineer? There seems to be unlimited demand for competent software professionals. But the field is one that involves a lot of complexity and where skills get old fast. It's a high-IQ profession. A small percentage of the population is talented enough for a career in software engineering. Another thing is that there are a lot of smart people who are just not technical enough.
The pool of people from which programmers and software architects etc. can be recruited is quite small. The combination of sufficient intelligence and stomach for dealing with highly technical stuff all day is rare. Absent strong AI, that could actually significantly slow down accelerating gains from technology absent very significant productivity enhancements through AI. But software development is still very much a craft. There is very little in it that can be automated. It's a messy world where building complex systems that work and are maintainable is very expensive because of the manual work required. Even after all these decades it's an immature industry.
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Exactly. The idea that people will be able to transfer their skills is absurd especially since most people are truly lacking in real world skills. At least in the United States, we churned out, from the university level, a lot of lawyers and finance people. Those are two professions that will be affected by AI to varying degrees.
This is likely to be automated too. There is already self evolving AI out there which basically codes itself.
There is a chance that for all the "learn how to code" mantra being preached, that might be largely automated too.
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Coding will be automated eventually. But I really don't believe it will be automated any time soon. The complexity of software engineering is hard to overstate. We're not talking about some typical problem domain that lends itself to the big data approach. We're talking about seriously complex conceptual hierarchies. Programming is all about abstract thought - and bugs and incompatibility problems that might stem from any layer in the stack. It's remarkable how little progress has been made in the field in all these decades. A lot of other engineering disciplines have evolved into mature industries where standard practices go a long way at producing predictably high-quality results.
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