I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon.
It's unclear which clause is meant to be negative or positive here. If we're close to strong AI, systems which ask clarifying questions would be close as well, no?
So yeah, an expert system that can read a natural language description of a feature and ask questions until it has enough detail to generate the code is science fiction in my opinion.
Having said that, maybe it could be achieved in a limited domain, SHRDLU-style. But that's just a way to deal with the ambiguity by excising it.
The issue is that natural language is often ambiguous. So what you want is to define a formal language that takes out the ambiguity.
Over the last decades, we have grown from writing assembly languae, towards ever more generic languages, that allow us to express the same idea with less effort.
I see programming advancing in this direction. It will still require training to 'speak' the formal language to communicate with computers, but it will always become easier and easier, only leaving computer scientists as a niche occupation to actually build the layers supporting the higher levels.
So no good in any country older than 245 years old?
"Bladerunners" might not be exactly what P.K Dick imagined, but maybe not so far off.
If we take AI to be the science fiction vision we seem to wish for then it will require managing, stewarding, planning, opposing, judging, teaching, healing, hunting down and deactivating, sabotaging, negotiating with....
Bricklayers became architects, surveyors and town planners as complexity increased in the construction world. Cities evolved to have traffic wardens and police... but the same has yet to really mature in digital technology. We imagine all these benefits of "smart cities" and "digital working" - many ideologies that have been around since the 1970s. Yet software engineering is still in its infancy with respect to civic function, ethics, rights and responsibilities, remedies and rules.
We have a more or less laissez-faire free-for-all market economy that produces isolated "goods". The failure of this default model can be seen in the tombstones of the Google graveyard. And, while it was a driver of innovation for some time, it isn't really working out in the big "civic" sense, and we certainly cannot rely upon centralised mega monopoly Big-Tech to do the right thing (except in a William Gibson style techno-fascist dystopia).
So I think many timeless jobs will adapt so that technologies can fit into our society, as welcome, well-managed friends, rather than allowing them to take-over our society. Maintaining that balance will be a new frontier for human intellectual labour in teaching, legal, planning and policing functions.
Bricklaying was automated 5+ years ago .. locally they've been in heavy use for new homes for three years or so.
Robotic bricklayer builds houses 3x faster than humans ( 5 years ago )
yes laying bricks in a long straight line is automated. Laying bricks in more intricate ways would take a lot more time. Also the machine still has to have human super vision and they seem to clean the mortar.
It's nuanced
doctor
bricklayer
programmer
Reasons all the same: difficult to automate with AI due to non-repeating nature of work. However repeating parts will be automated, hence GP likely to be a bot, also things like co-pilot will replace most web-devs. also houses can be mass built in container-like pods and stacked. so this is very nuanced. check-mate cheeky comment section.
will not survive:
retail worker non-luxury goods
delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US
truck drivers between cities
Twitter content moderator
Reasons all the same: easy to automate with AI due to repeating nature of work.
I think the common theme is that if you want something nice like seeing a human doctor, some personlised service, or a nice brick house you are going to see a human. But this will cost tremenduously. So rich people will interact with humans for most services/products while poor people will be interacting with bots. It's already happening (auto-bot callcentre helplines). Overall very distopian.