One-in-three developers fear A.I. will replace them
Evans Data Corp., in a survey of 550 software developers, asked them about the most worrisome thing in their careers. A plurality, 29%, chose this answer: "I and my development efforts are replaced by artificial intelligence."
Surprisingly, this concern about A.I. topped the second-most identified worry, which was that the platform the developer is working on will become obsolete (23%), or doesn't catch on (14%).
Concerns about A.I. replacing software developers has academic support. A study by Oxford University, The Future of Employment, warned that the work of software engineers may soon become computerized. Machine learning advances allow design choices that can be optimized by algorithms.
These systems can also detect bugs "with a reliability that humans are unlikely to match," the study said.
"Big databases of code also offer the eventual prospect of algorithms that learn how to write programs to satisfy specifications provided by a human," wrote the Oxford researchers, Michael Osborne, of Oxford's Department of Engineering Science, and Carl Benedikt Frey, an economics researcher at the university.
According Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, the thought of obsolescence due to A.I., "was also more threatening than becoming old without a pension, being stifled at work by bad management, or by seeing their skills and tools become irrelevant."