2%? You have an interesting idea of the world's population.
Just think about what that means. It means 2 out of 100 people can hack into Facebook's Legal Department Admin Panel.
I mean if we are talking "mentally capable to achieve that within a decade if the person does nothing else but strive to that goal"... Perhaps.
If we are talking "sit down right now and do it", then it's more like what... 10,000-100,000 people on earth? Which makes for more like 0.0014%?
ML will become a library. It has about as much to do with programming as a compiler. You don't need to know what it does, you just need to know how to make it do things. The problem with ML currently is that nobody really knows how to do things and that you have a million parameters that need tuning and most algorithms need continuous improvement and fine tuning to the use case. There is nothing "mainstream" about ML at this point, except that everyone wants to use it.
In maybe a decade, it might be found in standard libraries of programming languages and on top of things like `Math.abs`, we will have `ML.textToSpeech("Hello world")`, or `ML.isCat(image)`, etc. However, the problem I see with that is that no matter how far we wind the clock forward, we will only be able to put the most simplistic use cases into a library. `ML.isCat()` could be one of those, since most humans will be able to image categorization, it stands to reason that you could put this into a library. However, most industry application involved highly customized ML algorithms that are optimized for a very specific use-case. So there will always be a need for a research team in big companies at least. Maybe smaller companies will try to build their stuff by chaining libraries together.
Actually, code isn't what does that. It's true that code is one of the things that keeps it "all". However, it's not the best place for documentation or even storage of that knowledge. Code changes.
Tests are what you need to invest in. When you test all of you business use cases in an abstract (perhaps even no-code) way, you are truly independent. You can rewrite the system very quickly, if you had a test-suite that allows for quick iteration (TDD style) and does not depend on implementation details.
Given just the code? Well good luck migrating to another cloud vendor. You will probably introduce one million bugs on the way.
It's the "American Dream". They need to reiterate again and again how every dishwasher can become something if they just work hard enough lol. It's these things that make me pity Americans, but other stuff offsets it as well, so there we go.
Almost anyone who wasn't born into money did some menial task around high school or college. I worked at UPS as package sorter, now I earn 40 times as much at FAANG.
But that had nothing to do with me working at UPS. I worked there because I liked the extra money on top of what my parents gave me and to me it was like getting paid for gym :D.
I mean if we are talking "mentally capable to achieve that within a decade if the person does nothing else but strive to that goal"... Perhaps.
If we are talking "sit down right now and do it", then it's more like what... 10,000-100,000 people on earth? Which makes for more like 0.0014%?