Developers, your days of typing lines of code may be coming to an end. At least, that's what Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, thinks. In a leaked recording of an internal company conversation, Garman made a shocking revelation: within about 24 months, most developers won't be coding anymore.
“If we look 24 months from now, or even further out, and I can't predict exactly when that will be, it's possible that most developers aren't coding,” Gurman said, according to Business Insider.
And Gurman isn't the only one who believes this is the future humanity is building: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that AI will “turn anyone into a programmer” even if they know nothing about coding, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella has predicted that AI will create a billion new developers, leveraging the exact same premise.
And last year, former CEO of Stability AI Emad Mostaque predicted that “in five years, there will be no programmers.” He envisioned a future where AI models run locally on smartphones and do not require an internet connection. This vision has become a reality sooner than expected, with Google Pixels running Gemini mini locally and iPhones running open source LLM and generative image models through apps like Draw Things.
But not everyone believes in this AI utopia (or dystopia, depending on your profession): Gurman's predecessor, Adam Selipsky, said some AI companies are “highly overhyped,” drawing parallels to the dot-com bubble and warning that while AI itself could be transformative, its impact may be overestimated by Wall Street.
AWS' Gurman sees the key as redefining the developer's role, rather than getting rid of them entirely. “Coding is like a language that you use to talk to a computer,” he explains. “It's not necessarily a skill. It's a skill: how do you innovate? How do you build something that end users are interested in and can use?”
In other words, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy’s prediction that English will become the most popular programming language in tech may be true, but it’s also questionable given that the LLM excels at translating texts.
The hottest new programming language is English
—Andrey Karpathy (@karpathy) January 24, 2023
According to Business Insider, the AWS chief also introduced the concept of “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” in which developers work on all aspects of software development. Programmers can offload the mundane tasks to AI, allowing them to focus their brains on specialized problems, Gurman said.
But what will be the economic impact of a society in which machines take over human roles?
While some fear that AI will cause hundreds of millions of jobs to be lost across the workforce in the near future, others see great potential for growth. AI is predicted to add trillions of dollars of value to the global economy, and society as a whole will need to adapt. And that will come at some cost. A recent IBM report found that in the next three years, at least 40% of the global workforce will require reskilling due to the large-scale adoption of AI technologies.
The question, of course, is whether AI, as it continues to grow exponentially smarter, will be able to handle not just mundane tasks but also highly creative ones. With roughly 70% of business leaders saying they would like to outsource decision-making tasks to robots, we should definitely be careful about what we wish for.
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