TL;DR: Probably not on legacy industrial equipment. Or legacy people. But maybe if you start from scratch and only involve computers.
I was given a good piece of advice when I started work: "A process engineer's job is to make themselves obsolete." I've striven to make sure that I did everything I could to make sure I wasn't needed anymore.
And I'm happy to say that the processes will keep me employed for as long as I'm willing. Not from any self-serving malice, but rather that in the end it's terribly messy. The sheer inelegance of industrial manufacturing seems to defy strong automation at the meta-level. And not just because the machines are all only halfway obsolete, new, deprecated, upgraded, documented, up-kept, cleaned, and run (halfway to spec).
It's because to a computer, this mess quickly degrades into special cases. Lots of them. There actually are some shockingly clever software packages out there capable of the early stages of what you're describing, and - this is the kicker - they all require specialized engineering support to create, install, train, and use. The end product can be handled by a floor worker or management, but at some point you've got to explain the situation to a computer somehow, and that ends up being as complicated as programming.
For a much better written punchline, I'll defer to the short story Profession by Asimov [1]. I think it's cynical to think we'll never be able to solve the 'original thought' problem, but I also think it's easy to underestimate it. Things really are different today than 30 years ago, so perhaps a few more iterations will lead to tape-machines that can program the tape-machine programmer tape-machines. [2]
[2] Perhaps the worst part is we sorta already have this. There was just a post on the LLVM [3], which discussed how a computer translated and optimized a division command into machine code. That used to take a lot of work, and it took Real Programmers to optimize that code before this sort of automation. So it's not inconceivable that your ideal comes true. But I am cynical enough to think sami36 is right [4]: Doodleware is past the horizon. But computers that can talk to computers is probably in sight.
I was given a good piece of advice when I started work: "A process engineer's job is to make themselves obsolete." I've striven to make sure that I did everything I could to make sure I wasn't needed anymore.
And I'm happy to say that the processes will keep me employed for as long as I'm willing. Not from any self-serving malice, but rather that in the end it's terribly messy. The sheer inelegance of industrial manufacturing seems to defy strong automation at the meta-level. And not just because the machines are all only halfway obsolete, new, deprecated, upgraded, documented, up-kept, cleaned, and run (halfway to spec).
It's because to a computer, this mess quickly degrades into special cases. Lots of them. There actually are some shockingly clever software packages out there capable of the early stages of what you're describing, and - this is the kicker - they all require specialized engineering support to create, install, train, and use. The end product can be handled by a floor worker or management, but at some point you've got to explain the situation to a computer somehow, and that ends up being as complicated as programming.
For a much better written punchline, I'll defer to the short story Profession by Asimov [1]. I think it's cynical to think we'll never be able to solve the 'original thought' problem, but I also think it's easy to underestimate it. Things really are different today than 30 years ago, so perhaps a few more iterations will lead to tape-machines that can program the tape-machine programmer tape-machines. [2]
[1] http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
[2] Perhaps the worst part is we sorta already have this. There was just a post on the LLVM [3], which discussed how a computer translated and optimized a division command into machine code. That used to take a lot of work, and it took Real Programmers to optimize that code before this sort of automation. So it's not inconceivable that your ideal comes true. But I am cynical enough to think sami36 is right [4]: Doodleware is past the horizon. But computers that can talk to computers is probably in sight.
[3] http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/11/24/life-of-an-instructi...
[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4827459