This will be the next great source of consultant gigs!

Whenever this trope pops up, I recall the late 90's, when quite a few of my projects started when some people approaching my boss with a hugely complicated Excel spreadsheet that they had completely lost control over, and now they wanted it to do more, usually in the way of an improved user interface, some import/export automation and an underlying database model. My boss would talk back and forth with the customer a bit, and then drop it on my desk with a dry remark in the vein of "the usual drill". The actual work invariably involved a lot of conceptual clean-up.

At some point we might get there, but in my humble opinion it's like flying cars: technically possible, but they never really get off the ground for a fair number of very good reasons.

We should keep some malware defence at hand. Ancient extraterrestial AI's infiltrating our young, inexperienced earthly AI's! Also betelgeuzean spammers are not to be trifled with.

This discussion has popped up every other year for the last 60+ years, starting with Algol, Fortran and Cobol, stopping over at SQL, Visual Basic, Excel and all the point-click-profit tools, past and present. In their time, they were all meant to "democratize" programming, but LISP and Assembler (and all their spiritual descendants) are still with us.

It's like nuclear fusion: always ten years into the future.

My take: by all means give people some hammers and some wrenches, I'll happily write them an invoice after fixing their broken pipes ... but I'd much rather build them a proper house that didn't need fixing all the time.

That being said, all these developments have (arguably) made programming easier (for programmers) and will continue to do so. And, hey, if AI can reduce the boilerplate toil, count me in.

So anti-gravity is impossible? That's half of all science fiction ever, right down the drain. That's not only sad, it's unacceptable.

The general election in India is scheduled to start in a couple of weeks, and they recently had yet another big row with Pakistan. Just saying.

Whatever operating system is best at running games will dominate the future of the "desktop" in the home. For all it's faults, right now that is Windows, but that can change.

Should we teach everyone to write? I mean, only a few of us ever become poets. Or authors. Or even journalists. Why? To write crappy comments on Slashdot, that's why.

I mean, them young whippersnappers seem like drooling retards when I break out my trusty old soldering iron. You know, for debugging like back when bugs actually stung ...

If it won't facilitate flying cars by the year 2020, I'm not interested.

The fossils were NOT found i Asia, but in Libya, which was and is a part of Africa. The point of the paper is, that the variety of fossils indicate a much deeper evolutionary history than the African fossil record accounts for, and that Asia is the likely candidate for the earliest primates.