When I was at school one of my professors joked that the halting problem would ensure that, whatever else we were able to automate, there would always be jobs for programmers. I wonder.<p>A while ago there was the automatic statistician [1,2] which can do various statistical analyses and reporting automatically. This year there was a paper out of MIT on Deep Feature Synthesis, in which a largely automated system did quite well on Kaggle problems [3]. Now this, which seems like it could produce solutions to some problems I&#x27;ve used in technical phone screens.<p>At some point, someone will write a framework which automates the process of finding human cognitive tasks to automate, and someone else will give write a cost function of automated-task-to-business-need-mismatch which is amenable to optimization, and then we can all go home.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.automaticstatistician.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.automaticstatistician.com&#x2F;index&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;lloyd&#x2F;talks&#x2F;jrl-auto-stat-msr-2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk&#x2F;lloyd&#x2F;talks&#x2F;jrl-auto-stat-msr-2014....</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;EVO-DesignOpt&#x2F;groupWebSite&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;Site&#x2F;DSAA_DSM_2015.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.csail.mit.edu&#x2F;EVO-DesignOpt&#x2F;groupWebSite&#x2F;uplo...</a>