> What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box?
Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code?
It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ... and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs like food, housing and medical care.
Everyone gets into programming for their own reasons.
But to my personal philosophy: if I'm not coding to put myself out of a job, I'm thinking about the problem wrong.
When there are no more lines of code to be written, I shall do something else, content that I have done my part to free humanity from the burden of human-machine interfacing. I hear dairy farming is a demanding and rewarding challenge.
Dairy farmers aren't really looking for workers ... ironically, it is a job that has been almost eliminated by automatic milking machines and robotic harvesters.
Programmers change jobs like socks and are open to learning new things all the time. Software has been automating itself for 70 years and look how many people have jobs in this field.
Also, human desire is a bottomless pit, where automation saves we spend even more.
I wonder if HLL compiler authors had fears about this back when writing assembly and machine code was the norm.
But good point about the ambivalent result of eliminating busywork. Food, housing and medical care is available in most western countries for people who choose to not get a job... I think the social status problem and guilt of freeriding are also big factors preventing prople from living more leisurely lives in these countries.
Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code?
It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ... and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs like food, housing and medical care.