A group of researchers from Boston University and Columbia University have published a new paper titled “Robots are us: Some economics of human replacement,” which warns that machines could eventually take over many software development jobs. They say that the extremely high demand for developers is spurring the creation of computers that can write code. Eventually, they say, these robots could begin displacing human developers.
While this may sound like science fiction, they say that this phenomena has already been observed on a limited basis. “Take Junior, the reigning World Computer Chess Champion,” they write. “Junior can beat every current and, possibly, every future human on the planet. Consequently, his old code has largely put new chess programmers out of business.”
