Will robots take your coding jobs in the future?

yWe've been hearing about the machine takeover for a while now. A few decades at least. Ever since the T-100 hit the screen and showed us a world where robots aimlessly attack humans. It's 2020 now, and we are still quite a way's away from a standard robot being able to walk up straight and detect what an apple looks like.

But a different kind of "robot" has for sure entered the picture, and it's just as impactul in my book. And that robot is essentially software running on the cloud in a massive interconnected network that spans the globe.

And that might be something that we should all, at a minimum, be a little more aware of. Because if we aren't careful, we might just code ourselves out of a job at some point in the near future.

The truth is that machines can't really just write code completely independant. Someone would have to program the machine to write the code, in essence just creating even more jobs. Then someone else would have to valiate this machines code, because we can't trust machines fully just yet. And to be honest, I don't feel like we will ever fully 100% trust a machine.

Writing code is complex because it is still very much tied to being a human. What do I mean by that? That the following request for example?

"Can we have the little cat icon bounce around for a second when you hover over it?"

If that request came to a web developer, they would probably have a few ideas almost immediately on how to do this. And they would more than likely have to go through a bit of back and forth with the person requesting it until it is just right.

And that is a real request and there are many others like it. As I said, much of coding is still very much tied to the human element.

Having said that...

Elon Musk is alays quote as saying that "assumming any level of proression we will eventually be able to create virual real worlds and prove we are in a simulation". I will borrow the first half of that statement, as this is not the question for simulation theory.

Assuming any level of progression with A.I. and Machine Learning, there will come a point in time where the request written above can and will be translated easily into running functional code.

More than likely on a model that is trained using millions of hours of web development code, specifications, bugs and human speech patterns.

Much of this will also become much easier as the stanards and speciications and API's improve yearly. It's almost impossible to remember now, but there as a time where rounde corners were almost impossible in CSS and where having a cat bounce required a heavy duty CPU and millions of clock cycles along with some physics based equations requirer to simulate artificial gravity.

Once we get to the point where making an element bounce comes down to something like the folloing:

.cat{
    bounce: 1s
}

Now a well-trained model might not have any trouble at all in understanding the previous request.

And that might not be the worst world to live in to be perfectly honest. Those small tiny details that sound simple are usually the ones that take the longest to comlete, that are really unimportant, and that take away from more important work.

The takeaway

Yes, potentially robots can and will take away certain aspects of your programming job. Our best bet is to stay 1 step ahead of them the entire time. To learn more complex topics when it comes to coding.

Topics that are still decades away for any machine to learn. Perhaps even to learn to coe these machines. To improve their accuracy rates and to welcome in a new world of innovation where we aren't spending so many countless hours on trivial things.

I for one, welcome our robot overlords.