The future of programming is in doubt, but this fact has never been in doubt. The future has always been very clear - programming is a transitory phenomenon.

You can find much futurology in good ScFi - in fact even bad ScFi is better at the task than many dedicated think tanks. So having been an avid ScFi fan for many years, I find it no surprise that AI is taking over programming. But I do find it surprising that programmers are surprised by this. The reason is quite simple -

there are no programmers in Star Trek

Yes you see Spock with his tablet, complete with stylus, but you don't really think that what he is doing is programming. There are also computers, but no one programs them. They are talked at as if they were friendly co-workers and, and this is the really important point, the talking is not programming. Picard says "Tea, earl grey, hot" and the computer instructs the replicator to create such a beverage.  He doesn't even think about someone coding up a "tea" app - the computer is intelligent enough to know what he needs and controls the device to deliver. 

When the Star Trek crew encounters computers in the C20th, they expect to be able simply to talk to them. Good luck with that!

Do you think that Spock or Scotty plot together to create an appointments app?

No, the computer knows all about appointments and tells Scotty that it's time to decoke the engine at exactly the time that it needs it. The computer in Star Trek doesn't need programmers or apps because it does what its users need when they ask it to do something.

This is the way AI works in most Sci Fi stories.

So what are the computer techies doing?

In Azimov's stories the positronic brains didn't need programmers, nor did they need computer scientists. In this world the techies were some sort of AI psychiatrists. Dr Susan Calvin is termed a  robo-psychologist and she talks to the AI entities to try and solve their problems and make them do what we want them to do - sounds familiar, prompt engineering anyone? 

In Star Trek the closest we come to a computer scientist are the members of the Daystrom Institute of Advanced Robotics. The good doctors don't seem so much concerned with algorithms as with building better neural networks - again, sounds familiar? Of course, in the Star Trek world the advent of general AI is a bit fuzzy - is Data a robot, a general AI or a human implemented in a different substrate. These are the concerns of the Star Techies.

There are lots of similar stories that emphasise the idea that programming is not just a dead art but an irrelevant one. Just like the Universal Turing Machine can compute anything that can be computed, so the Universal AI can simply do what you ask without being told how to do it and hence there is no need to worry about algorithms and their expression - just ask.

I have long known that I am lucky to live in this unique time when programming is a thing. I don't expect it to last, but as long as it does I for one will enjoy it and welcome my new AI overlords who know everything I know and more.  

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