That was the hype surrounding Fortran when it came out in 1959: it would eliminate the need for programmers, because you could just punch the formulas and it would translate them into a program automatically. And in a sense it did, and its successors did to an even greater extent. Today you have "nonprogrammers" who can build, in a day, in OpenOffice Calc, computations that would have taken weeks to get written by programmers in the 1950s (when they could have been done at all.)

It's partly a matter of giving the objectives to the computer at progressively higher levels, and partly a matter of improving user interfaces so that you can tell what the thing is doing and what it's going to do.