Thoughts on the Future of Software Development

Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by vczf on Monday March 18, 2024 @03:28PM (#39748855)

You might be underestimating the potential of an automated evolutionary programming system at discovering novel and surprising ways to do computation—ways that no human would ever invent. Humans may have a better distribution of entropy generation (i.e. life experience as an embodied human being), but compared to the rate at which a computer can iterate, I don't think that advantage will be maintained.

(Humans will still have to set the goals and objectives, unless we unleash an ASI and render even that moot.)

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by beacon294 on Monday March 18, 2024 @05:19PM (#39750159)

ASI?

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by vczf on Monday March 18, 2024 @05:41PM (#39750390)

Artificial Super-Intelligence

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by nradov on Monday March 18, 2024 @05:31PM (#39750301)

Perhaps, but evolutionary results are difficult to test. They tend to fail in bizarre, unpredictable ways in production. That may be good enough for some use cases but I think it will never be very applicable to mission critical or safety critical domains.

Of course, code written by human programmers on the lower end of the skill spectrum sometimes has similar problems...

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by vczf on Monday March 18, 2024 @06:14PM (#39750710)

It doesn't seem like a completely different thing to generate specifications and formally verified programs for those specifications (though I'm not familiar with how those are done today).

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by jimbokun on Monday March 18, 2024 @11:51PM (#39752781)

I mean, I don’t even like programming with Spring because what all of those annotations are doing is horribly opaque. Let alone mountains of AI generated code doing God knows what.

I mean Ken Thompson put a back door into the C compiler no one ever found. Can you imagine what an AI could be capable of?

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by withinboredom on Monday March 18, 2024 @06:18PM (#39750738)

AI, even in its current form can provide some interesting results. I wouldn’t underestimate an AI, but I think you might be underestimating the ingenuity of a bored human.

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by ta1243 on Monday March 18, 2024 @06:46PM (#39750963)

Humans aren't bored any more [0]. In the past the US the US had 250 million people who were bored. Today it has far more than than scrolling through instagram and tiktok, responding to reddit and hacker news, and generally not having time to be bored

Maybe we'll start to evolve as a species to avoid that, but AI will be used to ensure we don't, optimising far faster than we can evolve to keep our attention

[0] https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/social-media-profound-boredo...

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by withinboredom on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @07:00AM (#39754528)

I’m bored all the time and I’m a human. Last I checked anyway.

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Re:Thoughts on the Future of Software Development by vczf on Tuesday March 19, 2024 @11:30PM (#39762632)

I agree, it's definitely still possible to get bored.

If I stop making progress on my personal projects, sinking my free time into games or online interaction is very unsatisfying.

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