
Machine Learning for Programming – Peter Norvig - gsg
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/machine-learning-general-programming
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stokedmartin
Presentation -
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/qw2z41o6wujze5p/SPLASH2014-PeterNo...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/qw2z41o6wujze5p/SPLASH2014-PeterNorvig-
KeynoteMachineLearningforProgramming.pdf)

Publication -
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2661744](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2661744)

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cerebraltangent
Can someone kindly transcribe this video for hearing impaired ?

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robotkilla
Thanks for posting - this is something I'm very interested in and will be
checking the slides / mp3 out soon.

I'm rather concerned that engineers will be replaced by AI in the future. I
wish we had some sort of developers union.

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davmre
Programmers will be literally the _last_ profession to be replaced by AI. If
computers ever exceed human programming capability, we're essentially at the
singularity (recursive self-improvement) and have bigger things to worry
about.

Of course that doesn't mean some kinds of gruntwork programming can't be
automated. Lots of CS research over the last half-century has focused on
exactly this: how to eliminate repetitive drudgery and provide the right
abstractions to enable human programmers to concentrate on what's interesting
and build bigger, more capable programs. In some sense a high-level language
compiler is an "AI" that programs for you: you give it a compact specification
of what the machine should do and it "writes a program" (generates machine
code) to do it.

The ability to machine-learn some functional components of a program doesn't
replace human programmers, any more than compilers do. It just enables
programmers to spend their time and energy in other ways and levels-up the
kind of programs we're able to produce.

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ZeroFries
I think nurturers and entertainers will be replaced last, because it will take
serious social changes to get people to prefer being entertained or cared for
by a robot. There's no social change needed to replace programmers.

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jordanb
A few years ago teachers were selfless nurturers doing an essential job for
low pay. Now they're lazy overcompensated government workers and there's a
dozen startups trying to replace them with computers.

Pixar disagrees that people won't accept computer-generated entertainment.

I agree that there's zero (maybe even negative) social capital for programmers
but as teachers have found out, one well-funded PR campaign can undo even the
best social capital.

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dragonwriter
> A few years ago teachers were selfless nurturers doing an essential job for
> low pay. Now they're lazy overcompensated government workers

The same faction -- and in many case the same _individuals_ \-- that portray
teachers as lazy overcompensated government workers today have been doing so
for decades. Conversely, the same people that have seen them as selfless
nurturers have been doing that for just as long. Nothing has changed in the
last "few years" in that regard.

