Particularly the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was cited.
Don't you think they made that call way too early? You could've had a full career between then and now.
I was getting into university around the same time. I don't recall any sentiments like this at all. And when discussions about automating programming came up it was usually dismissed as impossible - which it was back then. People didn't necessarily say it would never happen, but it was going to be a very long time in the future. It basically became possible to do in 2024 (and much better since then), way earlier than I would've have expected it to happen. But in the meantime from 1984 - 2024 I was able to have a pretty good career (I'm glad to be able to be retired now, I wouldn't want to be facing this in my 40s or 50s.)
For starters, the AIs in the Culture (series started in the 80s) ran the whole society and were superhuman and essentially better at any single thing than humans.
They were still the "independent, sentient" sort of AI vs the Claude "super fast information processing loop" style, though. But absolutely general purpose and original-thinking, and much more advanced than what we have.
But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.
I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.
Huh? I don't think it's true at all- HAL passes the Turing test and is effectively more capable than his human colleagues. What they could not see was the complexity of the technology around it- programmable computers everywhere, each running tons of extremely complicated software, everything networked.
Instead, what most science fiction got wrong (and I got entirely wrong myself before LLMs) is that the technology is a consumer technology. Inference is cheap enough that it can be served to millions almost for free. The famous machines of SF (HAL, Colossus, WOPR from War Games, SkyNet, etc.) are all dedicated systems in some inaccessible laboratory, in service of a single client and working at some multiple of human speed. What we got instead is as many instances as we want, directly available to anyone.