Quote:
while the human is merely the person who tells it what (s)he wants it to do, and all human programmers will end up being reduced to the level of the customer who wants a program to carry out a task
Isn't this what I'm doing all the time with programming languages, I tell what the computer should do in a language. If the author say that we will talk with the computer like Star Trek or similar, I don't believe that for a second as our languages are to ambiguous in order to describe a very specific task. That's why we need documentation or written descriptions what we should do (that includes more than just written language, math symbols). Will the languages be more high level? Yes, in terms of hiding resource handling and other tasks that the computer does for us (memory allocation, threading, files etc), and the language will instead focus on solving the particular task.
What really is the common denominator with about all programming languages is
math. Math is what engineers use in order to solve a specific task and also describe the reality or a system, and it will be like this for thousands of years to come.
I also predict peak AI. Right now media is praising AI as it would solve anything. Companies claim that they have some advanced AI program when it actually quite simple and often doesn't contain AI at all. AI is great when we fail to describe a problem with maths, for example identifying illegal material in pictures (the term neural networks and not AI should be used here, often confused with AI) as it is very difficult to describe that with mathematics. Instead they have a system that learn to recognize certain patterns. As for any other programming like process control in a factory, maths will still be king for ever. Maths will always be the place to go when you try to solve a task, when that fails move over to other methods. So AI is really a trap, that people might jump to AI when the pure mathematical solution is better.
Program languages will never be extinct, for the same reason the "language" of math will never be extinct.