In the future, most people will be functionally illiterate but extremely technologically savvy. Programming will looks like wizards conjuring things from a soup.

That is an amazing image of the future (not the literal image but the metaphor).

What if programmers of the future have almost no knowledge at all of how a program works? I guess in much the same way as most modern programmers have no knowledge of machine code, but even more so. They don't even know what language they're writing in.

"Write an app that connects people of similar interests, and incentivizes them to sell products to each other."

"Make it friendlier-looking"

"Add Stripe payments"

Anyone can do it, but just like artists of the future will be those who have memorized all the clever phrases to get Stable Diffusion to do its thing, programmers will be wizards who know all the invocations that generally seem to make something that works roughly right, and doesn't have too many bugs.

(Edit: Asking ChatGPT to "write JavaScript program that asks the user for their name and then greets them with a funny nickname it invents based on the name" resulted in a perfectly decent program.)

Prompting is like alchemy now, but in the future you'll just say what you want. AI prompter will be the shortest lived job.

> AI prompter will be the shortest lived job.

I don't think so. Crafting good requirements that guide the AI to the solution will be a dominant skill. If you can't articulate your problem and possible solutions, the model isn't going to be able to do anything for you.

I am senior engineer that works with skilled customers and they have a difficult time even understanding the problem let alone the solution to the problem they think they have.

This is not far off. Though for now you need to have good coding skills to glue what gpt spits out.

It's not far from it now. I have it spit out components and I don't know all the details. It just works

> In the future, most people will be functionally illiterate

Chatting AIs up all day long will improve people's vocabulary and expression. Language models could be the best language learning partner.

You can be illiterate and still have an excellent grasp of language and participate in a dialectical argument with the AI to arrive at a solution.

Functionally illiterate here means that there is a reduced reliance on reading, writing or on the end user's ability to understand the code produced.

Not really, combine OpenAI/ChatGPT with Googles knowledge about you, and it could likely figure out quickly what you want with minimum input. Possibly even predict and deliver before you are even aware you need it.