I think, eventually, this is where we end up. In not too many years, our job is going to be reviewing and debugging machine generated code. A few years after that, we're mostly caretakers and just keeping a human behind the wheel until we decide we don't need to watch the machines anymore.

Things are unfortunately going to get much more interesting much sooner than people expect.

There is no machine we've ever stopped watching. They all have to be maintained by people.

Don’t worry, the death of Dennard scaling and the specter of global warming will fix that, at least for some of us. There’s a lot of busy work and glue code to be automated but they’ve been trying to kill off development this way for at least forty years and all that changes is we get more sophisticated.

I wonder how you see global warming having an impact at all here?

Yes, Dennard scaling seems to be over, but Moore's law is still alive and kicking.

It really isn’t. I’m curious which pundits you’ve been listening to that are claiming Moore’s Law didn’t cap out back around 2015. We can only solve some of our problems with core count, and core count cares a great deal about Dennard’s Law, as well as Gustafson’s Law if not Amdahl’s.

Data center energy usage is becoming a category of its own with regard to carbon footprint. And of course the power dissipation of a data center is proportional to ambient temperature. As long as we don’t reach a dystopia where humans have to justify the air they breathe, replacing humans with machines has other problems than BTUs per unit of GDP.

Moore's law talks about the number of transistors in the chip that's cheapest per transistor. It's not talking about CPUs specifically.

So GPUs or even more 'exotic' beasts like TPUs count for Moore's law.

Moore's law doesn't say anything about how useful those transistors are. Nor does increasing core count somehow fall afoul of Moore's law.

That’s one way to go, coming up with a more precise way to ask for what you want is what I’m talking about though. Code obfuscation contests are about writing code that looks like it’s answering one question while doing something entirely different. An unambiguous subset of human speech would be great for software, and for contract law.