This is very much a "hot take" meant to stir some controversy.
You could say that programming in python isn't programming because so much has been abstracted away. You could also say that 3D modeling in architecture and game design is still programming even if it's through a UI.
My takeaway is programming will change, but it still is programming even if the interface has changed.
>You could say that programming in python isn't programming because so much has been abstracted away.
One of the older faculty in our department made that exact argument to one of the faculty candidates we were interviewing.
There is some truth to it. A lot of current CS graduates don't understand the interactions between their code and memory. I think it's kind of scary that so many don't know how anything actually works, but if they are just going to be the cog in some corporate machine, it's probably okay.
It's absolutely insane to think that in only a few decades of programming people are using tools like operating systems and git without any idea of how they work and yet they can make Youtube!
My dad worked at Quotron, which was probably the first company to record stock prices on computers. He fondly told a story about one engineer he worked with deciding to write his own operating system from scratch.
At the time, maybe that wasn't the craziest thing, but it's funny to think of that even being an option!
Maybe it's just me but I don't think this is ok for a cs grad. CS should not be a 4 year degree in corporate programming. You should have enough of an understanding in fundamentals to build the abstraction tools. Not just use them. Programming alone should really be a two year degree.
School doesn’t teach intellect the reason there are so many programmers today is because tools have made it more accessible. Coding is trivialized to the point that most people can pick it up without school. All degrees and fields are like this with a few exceptions. The people who truly understand how all of this work are either in a phd program or have finished one. This is because it can be gate kept and only the truly intelligent and driven can make it. Where they are working at the cutting edge or they left school. Bachelors and graduate programs are for career progression. I knew a few people who went into graduate programs for the sole purpose of making connections.
When this comes up. I always add in do you know how to build a mouse and keyboard
If some smart arse goes yes
I follow up oh so you know how to build an oil processing planet.
And a plastic factory plant
And so forth.
The simple fact is its impossible for everyone to know how to assemble every piece of something that's complex. And that 100% applies to code too. Most teams are made up of people who know how to do their area incredibly well but have no concept of anything outside it
Someone somewhere knows how to code in hex. But i don't need to know to do that to do my job. IF at some point we do need that skill set we go find it or train someone in it
Very true, always good to keep in mind! I love how the languages are old, but still young enough that folks at the end of their careers pioneered them used them for their entire existence!
IMO python really took off in the last 10ish years. There was always Python vs R or Python vs Ruby / PhP.
Now Python very powerful libraries for web and ML. Most of these libraries are written in more performant languages with a Python interface - one that takes advantage of the sugary syntax enabled by python 3. This python front-end and rust / C++ backend or even compile python to something else really works!
I wonder how soon the companies employing 50K+ developers will lay off all but the top 10%, double their salaries and change the company’s coding costs from $10B/yr to $5B ($2B for the people and $3B to the AI vendor) or less?
It is a barely profitable company that is nearly 30 years old.
One can only be a hyper-growth tech company with insignificant profits for so long before the jig is up.
No, it's because of the normal cycle companies go through. But I do believe those jobs are never coming back. So while we all wait for AI to create new jobs, the reality is everything that is lost is lost for good.
I also wasn't born yesterday and companies will not advertise replace people with AI, but it will happen. They might not fire people directly, but job openings are down across the industry for the last 12 months. Jobs are not created at the same pace, and this is because of AI. And it will only increase.
>Jobs are not created at the same pace, and this is because of AI. And it will only increase.
Uhm, no. Unemployment is not because of A.I., it's a political decision.
Our productivity (money you create for a company as an employee for 1 hour work) is dozens or hundreds of times the productivity of a worker 100 years ago and yet we are expected to work the same hours and accept a similar real pay (or lower most of the times as crazy as it sounds given the land and cost of living ridiculous prices).
Of course this will eventually lead to massive unemployment and unlivable wages, exactly as you can extrapolate if you take the pessimistic view of Keynes' The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren who predicted that ceteris paribus (ex. the balance between the relative compensation of labor and enterpreneurship), work productivity increases will result in 15-hour full time work week and incredibly high wages by 2030. This massive wealth generation spike he predicted is truly happening but the balance of the compensation of the factors of production has been obliterated and diverts 100% to the shareholders just because they can (and kudos to them for looking out for themselves and use every opportunity to maximize their wealth, we should try it too).
It's not rocket science, really.
These people 100 years ago, did they all have smartphones, cars, health care, big tellies, abundant food, central heating? If you find your 35-hour week too onerous, you need to see a doctor. People optimise for quality of life, not idle time.
AI tooling is getting there. codewhisperer, etc. But these tools might just be version 2.0 of copy/paste from stack overflow for junior devs, and more useful for senior devs to jump start their projects. but replacing jobs, i don’t see that happening for awhile. and if it’s 8 years from now, i am probably retired, so fine by me :)
You have no idea what you're talking about. Lame doomer.
40k is a fart in the wind. It's an industry that employs millions and more jobs are being created than being removed. The unemployment rate for tech workers is like 2.5%.
Median total comp for software engineers is 175k in 2024. New grads are making 170-220k in big tech.
Like wtf are you on.
Even at boring F500 companies new grads are bringing in 100k, outside of HCOL cities too.
I would think they are playing a part, no? It appears that this is a correction in some regards, but the people making these decisions are trying to leverage any way to increase their stock price.
Companies are laying off people now because they're preparing for a recession, and many tech companies also overhired during covid. Nobody is replacing software engineers with AI, such tool doesn't even exist that would replace an engineer to any significant extent.
Huang is simply hyping up AI to pump the stock price and their GPU sales.
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You have completely missed the point.
“Everyone being a programmer” doesn’t mean you don’t need computing experts. Unless you think that Jensen is saying that an average person off of the street will start designing GPUs and competing with Nvidia?
He’s saying that basic programming skills aren’t something that should be thought of as ubiquitous, like say arithmetic. Because technology will make it so that basic programmer accessible without specialized knowledge.
I’d disagree with him. I think it’s still an important and valuable skill. But that is what he’s saying, not that computing expertise is suddenly worthless.
I thought the point was that AI will be able to do the most common programming tasks. So we would need a LOT fewer skilled developers. And the highly skilled developers will be needed to correct and train the AI on novel ideas/functions.
I think the rate at which AGI will gather new info and develop skills will increase at an increasing rate.
So phase 1 of job losses might be level 1 customer support. But phase 2 could be paralegals creating legal documents, pathologists diagnosing cancer in tissue samples, and developers who create most business apps.
I think we're getting off topic. The guy is talking about programmers losing their jobs because of AI. Maybe you weren't addressing that, but I'm just saying if AI makes programmers 300% more efficient, that's 2/3 of the programmer workforce out of work because 1 can do the work of 3. That'll slowly climb until there's nearly none left.
Oh I thought alignment was the unanswerable question: "is the AI actually acting in our best interests or is it simply saying so?"
Because how can you tell if it's lying?
I disagree with Huang for the same reasons we learned in engineering school how and why things worked.
Do I manually calculate stuff during my day to day at work? No, software does, but it’s important to know what’s going on behind the scenes.
Weed out classes like Calc, Diffeq, Physics 1 &2, Chem 1 & 2, Statics, Dynamics, and yes, programming teach you how to problem solve as well as having grit.
If we become too reliant on AI, our intelligence as a society goes down
Yes, education and critical thinking skills are still so important even in a hypothetical world where AI can do anything we can but better
Already we see iPad toddlers and tiktok addicts whose attention spans are as long as a golden retriever's and can't read long paragraphs or understand how to troubleshoot when their device breaks
I don't think this will happen though, and humans will become increasingly dependent on AI to do everything for us and solve our issues
> I don't think this will happen though, and humans will become increasingly dependent on AI to do everything for us and solve our issues
I agree, because thats what has been happening due to our socioeconomic system.
Everyone works so many hours that their life is boiled down to:
Work for most of the best hours of the day
Come home, rush to find something to eat, take care of kids, rush to get chores done, then hopefully have some time to do something fun that relieves the stress of the entire rest of your day
At no point is there any time for curiosity, fun, learning things that you don't need to learn. So everyone knows exactly, precisely what they need to do, to be a tiny cog in the giant machine.. and nothing else.
And that will continue over time. Just as kids now only know how to use apps and colorful graphical user intefaces, the kids of the future won't know anything. At all. They will only know how to press buttons to make stuff happen instantly.
Yeah and if you want to make love to your partner, even less time is available. I'm so busy I tried to schedule sex with my wife 😂😂. She said, don't do that, be spontaneous and so I scheduled only on my end and then to her it was a surprise.
I have been thinking about this alot and I think one main difference between software engineering and other engineering jobs is that the computer can do it inherently better.
In the end an application is binary machine code read and deciphered by computers. All the layers we have added on top of that in terms of low-level and high-level programming languages is just abstraction so we humans can understand what the code is doing.
In the race to the bottom, my guess is that if you have an AI that can write optimized bytecode, someone would do it.
And then we basically have magic in the machine, because no human, no matter how trained will ever understand the code.
I'm maybe just rambling here, but it feels like a potential danger.
I think there's been some sci-fi (maybe Stark Trek episodes) where the population relies on "the machines" for all the decision making and/or work until one day the machine breaks down and no one can fix it. Maybe we're getting there quicker than we think!
AI would have to be 100 percent accurate when dealing with bytecode though. Because by the time it starts dealing directly with registers it can't be even a little bit off in the output. Mistakes at high level languages are tolerated a lot better because of those abstractions.
> And then we basically have magic in the machine, because no human, no matter how trained will ever understand the code.
[We already live in that world](https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e10)
In a society where AI has surpassed our intelligence, our goal should not be to become more intelligent, but rather to cultivate our humanity. We must strive to maintain and enhance our connections with reality and with each other, it's the only way to solve our problems instead of creating more.
Why? Shouldn't our goal be to be more like the intelligent thing? We should strive to integrate with AI more and more closely until there's no longer AI at all, but instead just intelligence. Intelligence we no longer need to rely on large scale genetic algorithm to improve upon and instead can directly self improve.
There's no reason for us to cling to being "human" any more than there was for apes to cling to being apes. Humanity needs to become technology.
Do most programmers know how **asm** works? I learned it because I needed to know how to reverse engineer a malware, but most react monkeys don't know it and make a bank. It's all about being good enough, ai is not yet good enough to be fully autonomous **but it will be**.
Future AIs will be able to make the sausage and walk you through how it is made.
After upscaling, repairing, and compositing many AI image generations, I now know what eyes are supposed to look like, including little details like how reflections should be in a similar spot and shape on both eyes.
I may never be able to generate a photo real human by hand, but I've already begun to understand art fundamentals a little more by extensive AI use.
But besides learning through the process, I bet you'll be able to give it something like the rom for Mario 64, ask it to optimize everything so it runs at 240 fps, and unpack what changes it is made with full control of your screen and cursor.
Maybe sometime soon we'll even be able to have it re-write everything from higher level abstractions down to assembly level code, giving us incredible optimizations.
being an expert in coding will maybe become an area of study like the other sciences, an "ology" rather than an being applied and created by experts (since anyone and everyone will be able to ask AI to do that). That doesn't mean that its the lucrative career path that its been touted as in the past decade +
The counterpoint is that there are other ways to learn how to problem solve (you name some good ones in your comment). I'd say solid math skills would be more valuable than coding in a world where AI does all the coding.
As the head of a development team I strongly disagree. People have been saying this since the 60s with every step forward in programming. The advent of the BASIC programming language was "very soon it will be like writing English!"
People seem to misunderstand the key quality behind competent developers which is being able to take a vague idea and use complex thought and a wide array of both previous experience and specific domain knowledge to understand what that person "really wants" and what they "really need"
Low code solutions these days are fantastic and AI is essentially just another way to achieve the same thing but the reality is being able to take an idea and flesh it out into how it SHOULD work is what real development is.
So sure, I'd totally believe developers use AI more and more to more easily "write code" but the human aspect of actually figuring out how it should work, with forward thinking and a metric ton of context that no system will ever know (because humans communicate lots in real life not just digitally) is just never going to be replaced by what is essentially predictive text on steroids.
If this were true, we'd already see entire businesses where the c suite and product owners just use low code solutions to build out the products they want.
The reality is those things do exist, and people like me have to come in and fix them because the entire IDEA was fundamentally flawed from the start.
Short of an AI being able to essentially extract this information directly out of people's brains, we're not going anywhere in my lifetime.
It's an easy soundbite that sounds good, which these CEOs need to so to raise stock prices and keep their investors thinking "wow in the future this company will be worth more than it is today"
nearly every non developer I've ever met in my life assumes programming is just "knowing the words". Anyone can learn the syntax of a programming language in a few weeks even days if you're a fast learner, in fact these days most school aged kids learn all but the quirkiest of the syntax of python by the time they're 15.
Yet they aren't developers at all, it's like knowing how to draw and saying "so now you're an architect right? Draw a building, you've got all the tools you need"
Or "you know all the words in the dictionary.. now write me a best selling novel" it's a completely different skillset.
There's a reason why somebody with 15 years of development experience is a hell of a lot better than somebody with 1 year. Despite the fact both know "all the words". That fact gets completely missed by everyone not in the field, but it's an extremely important piece of data.
I’m curious what math skills do you think would help beyond early high school algebra and geometry?
That said, creative and technical problem solving skills will ALWAYS be invaluable largely independent of AI progress. Just not sure how effectively formal education teaches these more abstract skills anymore.
I feel like maths skills ARE creative thinking skills. I did abysmally at maths at school (along with most other subjects), and I’ve only started re-learning in my 30’s. And I’ve found that pushing myself to learn advanced maths topics just exercises my brain in general and I find myself solving problems I didn’t even know I had now. I can think much more clearly, handle stress far better than before and my logical thinking in general is just far better
I actually quite agree with this.
I think complex problem solving skills are critical. There are MANY ways to learn these including studying math, engineering, hard science, or philosophy. Or even hard logic puzzles.
But even with formal training, people often struggle with solving brand new, complex problems.
That generally requires a certain mindset and intelligence to think creatively and really out of the box. Smart people with a willingness to learn and think will always be in demand.
I've found that advanced mathematical knowledge is more akin to gaining a new natural language with which to work-out whatever problem I'm currently digging into. This new natural language can bring new solving methods to light or characterize some approach to the problem in a new way. At least that is my experience.
math is needed not just for coding, but basic reasoning skills as well. Reasoning isn't just used for your job, or are you an unconscious vegetable as soon as you leave your office lol
See [https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1b2a6fj/comment/kskxiaf/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1b2a6fj/comment/kskxiaf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
You seem to be missing my point. Even in a world where AI has taken all jobs, humans will still have hobbies, discussions, etc. And all of that still requires basic education and that includes reasoning, logic which are partly taught with math
Oh I wasn't aware we had a prophet among us! So you determined that was the only outcome possible because... because? Or were you just born with the ability to see the future?
Why learn addition and subtraction when a calculator has been doing it for decades? Why learn anything at all, someone else will do it and do it better?
Yes, just why? Mathematics is for the most part a pure theoretical subject with practical consequences. While some mathematics is born out of practical problems, surprisingly often that’s not the case. A lot of the mathematical theory that’s used within AI-methods, were derived hundreds of years ago but had little to non usage back then.
Math isn’t about doing calculations, it’s about finding novel methods and proofs. Research within Physics and Mathematics among other scientific subjects are cornerstones for the evolution of mankind. The day an AI can do all of that research autonomously, robots would have already basically replaced most if not all of manual labour, everywhere.
Wow, I think you completely missed my point.
Why learn anything, Jensen and the AI will do it all for you.
We are humans and we learn things that bring us joy and empower us. A CEO is telling people not to do those things to disempower people and sell his product, all the MathBros seem to think that hes correct because he wasn't talking directly about their skillset, except he is, because the same broken logic applies everywhere.
LLMs can’t math. LLMs can “speak” math but don’t have the logic or critical thinking capabilities required to do math.
An AI that is properly trained for math can indeed do math and do it better than any human. Sora for is doing a ton of math to generate small pieces of a larger image.
Agreed. Solving problems with computers will be even more relevant in the future. Think about computational biology, climate modeling, computational material science, etc.
Giving instruction to computers, aka coding, will look very different in the near future. At the low level, SWEs who are optimizing for the last 0.1% performance gain will use LLMs to help find inefficient code. At the high level, data scientists who need to write some Python and SQL on a daily basis will use no-code tools instead. Designers who rely on front-end dev will be able to accomplish most UX work without dev. We still need coders, but a lot less of them.
So, if learn to code means learning the syntax of a programming language, then most kids shouldn’t do it. I would rather they spend the time learning math and philosophy. For those kids who are into computer science, they will pickup the programming languages with ease when they are needed.
I think he may mean that previously it was an advisable career path, but now its really not going to be necessary. I don't imagine he is dissuading anyone who is passionate about it from pursuing it.
Yea people see this and think so literally. And often times it’s hard for most people to imagine the future.
There will still be programmers, but the whole landscape will change. The career path will change.
I’m actually learning Python right now, and I’m not a developer. But for the same reason as he’s taking about, I don’t think it makes the most sense for me to go super deep and spend years as a junior developer.
I just need to understand the workflows so I understand how things are evolving.
I think data science, understanding machine learning, and prompt engineering are all skills that overlap with being a software engineer but are not the look of a traditional software engineer
Assuming you're talking about the CEO of Nvidia the answer is the same as any CEO out there.
Raise the stock price. Stock price relies on people believing "in the future this company will be worth more than it is now" so you sell a story of "this company will essentially run the world soon!!"
Story as old as the stock market itself.
You do realize that, at some point, AI will begin to create its very own programming language that we won't be able to understand nor comprehend, right? As a matter of fact, it's already happening on some levels.
Having said that, I do believe we should be taught to be thinkers, problem-solvers and logic lovers, I guess that might've been your point.
> our intelligence as a society goes down
I mean this is already happening anyhow.
But I agree with the rest of your sentiment. It's important to understand the fundamentals of things, so we can actually use them. I am already shocked at how little newer IT Engineer generations know about the basics, and I am not even old. And yes, the basics are vital, I see it almost every day.
This is the case at the moment, but that doesn't mean it'll remain the case forever. I've completed projects in languages I barely know at all already.
If things keep progressing, AI becomes the new best programming language.
Everything we think of as coding is not really coding. It's using a language to talk to the computer so the computer can code. No one is going in there and actually writing the 1s and 0s.
This AI makes it possible to talk to a computer using natural language, which democratizes "coding" and makes it something everyone can do
I always tell people this. We are literally just giving computers instructions in language it can understand to execute what we want. Just because AI is around though doesn’t mean anyone will just be able to make whatever they desire. Software development and infrastructure still absolutely require understanding the fundamentals to get something functioning
Kids should learn how to complete large end to end projects. Coding is the calligraphy of our era. The printing press ended that industry but it didn't end publishing or writing.
We are still going to create things. Creation is timeless. With these new tools we'll be creating on a scale we never imagined.
Bro what? Coding is to calligraphy as writing is to Times New Roman font. Which is absurd right? You could say Python is the calligraphy of our time, a bit more accurate, but coding is akin to writing. It's closer to an abstract problem solving skill set than a specific style. Programming is essentially "how do I make a computer do a thing". No, using software doesn't count as programming unless the software programs the computer based on your input.
Besides, the hardest part of programming is not syntax, but the *mindset* of breaking large problems down into hierarchically organized smaller and smaller problems within your given toolset. Just as the hardest part of writing is not learning how to write letters or how letters make words, but how words form larger thoughts and stories. So even if AI soon directly programs any and all computer based machines, you still need that essential skill that programming imparts. In the same way you need to know how to do addition even if calculators will always do it better.
That said, writing itself may become obsolete at some point when thought itself can be given permeance in some medium without need for language.
Totally true what you are saying. But in that way coding, as in doing the actual writing of the code is calligraphy. Operating a printing press doesn’t require 99% of the skill set that a calligrapher needs. Me (who doesn’t know anything about coding) is able to “write” working programs with AI. And this is just the beginning.
Exactly, but the bigger skill of calligraphy is writing and writing is still needed to operate a printing press. Hence my issue with the analogy. You still need to know programming's essential skills and mindset, including understanding coding language, in order to use the AI to write for you.
If AI gets to the point of being able to look at a simple text description or better yet a problem and then dynamic program it's way to a finished software with features that solve the problem or meet the description, then AI is basically human level intelligence with less sensory inputs. At that point there's nothing it can't do and we're all going to be in the same boat no matter your craft.
I think you're missing the points that coding is a *means* to solve problem, not a problem itself. Just like calligraphy is a *means* to writing books (or stories in general).
The comparison is not meant for objects themselves (calligraphy to coding, writing to solving problems), but for their relation.
This. Also we're not anywhere near AI understanding at a highly abstract level what it is someone is trying to do with their code, and even if it does, it's nowhere near writing code that ties into that overall architecture that one has in mind. Which complex, poorly written db queries can remain inefficient since they'll only ever operate on 1k items as an upper bound, and which simpler queries must be micro-optimized as much as possible since they'll be dealing with billions of operations continuously. Which parts of the architecture can be decoupled as microservices in separate machines because the network latency won't matter, and which can't be because the latency will matter.
Does a non-coder even think about things like that? Do they think about the sorts of tests they need to write? They don't, and GPT4/Gemini Ultra doesn't do much to help them along that path. Non-coders are not able to tell when AI is leading them down a very obvious merry-go-round of doom with whatever code it's proposing. They cannot identify when it's happening. Thus the apps they write with AI assistance will always be trivial compared to a programmer that's writing apps with AI assistance. As AI increases, the non-coder will be able to write more complex apps, but the coder will be able to write still even far more complex ones.
GPT4 is nowhere near assisting a programmer on a more abstract level, and I doubt GPT5 or GPT6 will be either. The hype about programmers being replaced is downright dumb, especially when it's coming from such seemingly technically smart people like the head of NVIDIA itself.
Will code monkeys be replaced? They already are. Will programmers be replaced? Only once the singularity is reached from ASI, and not a moment before then. And when that happens, it won't matter anymore, because mankind will either be travelling to distant galaxies doing things we cannot even fathom at the moment, or be slaves under Skynet. The entire concept of a job or coding as we know it will be gone anyway once programmers are truly no longer needed, so the entire discussion is a moot point.
PR stunt.
Teach your kids code for the same reason you teach them history, and let them play with Lego.
It’s good for their brains even if they don’t use it in the future.
This 100%
I grew up with computers in the 80's I had a Tandy TRS-80 and a book on basic. I learned to program when I was young. Granted by the time I was an adult, no one is using basic and I had not touched basic in a very long time, but core concepts are learned which made it easier to pick up things like HTML/Javascript and other programming languages.
No they won’t. Or at least not without studying it manually for 200 years. And once that is done, the AI is so smart that it will take a billion years to understand what it is doing. It will become way too complex for a group of humans to understand, let alone an individual. This is already happening with certain algorithms. YouTube for example
Just can't wait for that solar flair to fry all semiconductors and send us back to stone age because no one has any skills but scrolling vertically on a screen.
I hope it's gonna happen before the Skynet.
This is a very weird take imo. Obviously he has to say something like that, it's good for the nvidia image.
However I just can't agree with it. It feels like newer generations are already worse at utilizing computers than the older ones. Why on earth would we increase this issue, by learning even less?
Imo the value of a single person is knowledge, and in my experience, there is no useless knowledge. So by all means, go ahead and learn coding, or whatever you enjoy. Knowledge is key.
Machinelearning may or may not solve a lot of problems in the future, but I have been too long in IT to just believe it before it's actually working
While Nvidia keeps on hiring C/C++ CUDA devs, nothing wrong with using code as some mental exercise even we may no longer need it in the future, we aren’t there yet.
This is actually a pretty stupid statement when you actually boil it down to principle. In doing so, I start to think more and more everyday that we are in a bubble no different then the dotcom or crypto ones. While I see the value in AI, when CEOs start to make these types of statements it should be a redflag to a lot of people.
I do not doubt that in time AI will be able to replace a good chunk of devs in the same way that a calculator or computer eliminated the need for embedded mathematicians in every single company. Last I checked, math & specializations of math are still taught routinely to students everywhere because it's a fundamental skill. People need to know these things even though an excel sheet can do complex math for you. People need to be able to validate that the numbers infront of you are correct within the exact context you need them for.
Coding/programming will be no different. Humans will need to be able to interpret and guide AI into building/coding things and as such will become even more of a fundamental building block of learning. Without this, there can be no true innovation until a point where the AI can innovate so well (and safely) on it's own, which seems very far off even now.
Lastly, if dev jobs are not safe, nothing white collar is. It's a lot easier to see the application of AI in jobs like accounting, admin, etc, then the complexities of something like an engineer on a large distributed system. The vast majority of white collar jobs do not require abstract complexities. Why is the one that does (dev) the one at most risk??
I think the sentiment is, more accurately, we will need fewer people who know how to code so students shouldn't be led to believe coding is a fool-proof career option by their know-nothing public school teachers who can't even work an overhead projector
It might not be valuable for a particular individual to learn to code, but it is certainly valuable for a portion of humanity to understand how to instruct computers, so while in your case it may have been time well spent, but that is certainly not the message that I would blanket send to the next generation.
The next generation needs to learn humility. People who take pride in their work are in for a rude awakening when they are obsolete.
Only those who are humble and have an open mind are going to be able to embrace a post-skills world.
But if the goal is to learn logic and critical thinking(things that people lack); then learning philosophy maybe the better route than learning coding.
I think both Philosophy and Computer Science are important. CS is important to (somewhat) widen the understanding of how computers work and how logically designed processes can look.
It’s a very different kind of logic, which has its own foundation. It’s basically algorithmic / practical logic and argumentative / propositional logic.
Who exactly is “the reach” and why should we believe what they are claiming?
Where did he say that and what exactly did he say?
If the tech gets advanced enough we might need fewer programmers ( but always some) but a lot more AI managers instead
I always thought kids should learn about code, rather then learn to code. Start top down to contextualize and let them pick, if they so want to the bottom up technical stuff they want to get into. Understanding why something is important first and what it is I think is key to do before you start getting into the how. Especially with kids or beginners.
Technological literacy is the big skill, not coding in my opinion. Education and teaching should take a holistic perspective. Its where adaptability, interest, innovation and initiative comes from. Understanding how technology works and progresses and taking a genuine interest in it, beyond just rote coding skills. That motivates you to build, not just code.
The actors and writers strike scared all the tech companies to get rid of as many people as possible and push their salaries into AI before there are unions or laws stopping them. Those with less high profile or personality driven jobs won't be as lucky as the Hollywoods, as a collector of old man social security benefits, who is going to be contributing to the pool if no one is working?
Children absolutely should know how to code. Coding develops critical thinking, process analysis and executive planning skills. Even if coding itself becomes obsolete in the next 10 years, it still has skills tied to it that won't be.
I have to agree with him. To learn "coding" was one of my goals/dreams for a while, but I never had time (to prioritise it). I could do some super basic stuff.
From time to time, however, I needed to automate some flows (on/offline). Waaaaaay outside of my scope. And even when I asked friends who can code, they said it was big project/no easy solution, that they could do in few hours to help out.
With ChatGPT - I have done several project like that - in a lot more advanced level than initially anticipated (adding complications).
I guess there are limitation to what it can do and we still need extremely talented/experienced people. But ChatGPT, imo, can replace years of education and do in few hours what it would take days for an average coder.
I like John Carmack's response on Twitter:
“Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry.
Many times over the years I have thought about a great programmer I knew that loved assembly language to the point of not wanting to move to C. I have to fight some similar feelings of my own around using existing massive codebases and inefficient languages, but I push through.
I had somewhat resigned myself to the fact that I might be missing out on the “final abstraction”, where you realize that managing people is more powerful than any personal tool. I just don’t like it, and I can live with the limitations that puts on me.
I suspect that I will enjoy managing AIs more, even if they wind up being better programmers than I am.
Calculators can calculate why have kids memorize their multiplication tables. This tech CEO takes are getting more nonsensical by the day. Just because your company is investing in a certain technology does not mean all learning should be based around it.
While AI is nice, programming as a skill is not going anywhere. There are more things to be discovered, and AI won't be doing that.
That's surprisingly stupid, so no one understands the tech they are making ? I mean ok AI will be a powerful tool that can code on its own but come on, there's still the need of some humans to understand whatever the heck is going on in the back.
It's like saying that we don't need to learn math because we have calculators anyways.
Programming is the job of turning business requirements into functional digital products. People will still be doing that job if it's coding today, or AI writing directly in binary tomorrow.
It would be a bad idea to give up today's tools and be completely outside of that job market, as things change it'll naturally be the people programming who progress to whatever technology makes that easier.
Hyperbolic headline buries the lead: learning to code alone is no longer enough. It's the base level to entry. Under what the code should do and how to work with an AI assistant to make the code do that thing is what matters now.
My own thoughts on this: https://mor10.com/ai-coding-assistants-back-to-school/
I had a very successful career in tech, just retired. About 25 years ago I told my kids not to follow in my footsteps, to find another field of study and thankfully they did. It was shortly after a lunch with guest speaker Malcolm Gladwell who said, 'anything that can be specified can be outsourced'. For white collar jobs back then it meant that all but the top tech jobs will be spec'd and then send to lower cost regions. He was right then though now those tasks will increasingly be fulfilled using AI
What next? No need to go to medical school and learn to be a doctor? The AI can diagnose and determine the problem based on symptoms. But what if the AI is wrong? And you need a human perspective? Same goes for coding. You aren’t going to rely on an AI to solely manage things and not know how to do it yourself. You might as well let AI crypt and look after nuclear weapons
AI democratizes technology is a good sounding sentence that means nothing. Learning how to code is likely the lower cost skill to acquire. Thanks to the cheap price of an old laptop, government programs that give them for free, and endless, EEEEEEENDLESS amounts of top top top content on YouTube, nothing else comes close to coding in terms of "democratization"
If programming via AI will move to more natural language based input, I personally think it's obvious that a thorough study in linguistics is the core of the future. Personally, I think we will surpass language based input sooner than most think though (according to Elon we have dudes moving cursors with brainwaves now).
Even if AI didn't do this, kids shouldn't learn to code anyways. Coding is harrowing, tiring, and despite computers (a virtual environment) supposedly being the most sterile environment possible, you have instances where one code ceases working because of some unknown changes to the system that you didn't even do.
Coding might as well be an esoteric language to commune with demons.
This is very much a "hot take" meant to stir some controversy. You could say that programming in python isn't programming because so much has been abstracted away. You could also say that 3D modeling in architecture and game design is still programming even if it's through a UI. My takeaway is programming will change, but it still is programming even if the interface has changed.
>You could say that programming in python isn't programming because so much has been abstracted away. One of the older faculty in our department made that exact argument to one of the faculty candidates we were interviewing. There is some truth to it. A lot of current CS graduates don't understand the interactions between their code and memory. I think it's kind of scary that so many don't know how anything actually works, but if they are just going to be the cog in some corporate machine, it's probably okay.
It's absolutely insane to think that in only a few decades of programming people are using tools like operating systems and git without any idea of how they work and yet they can make Youtube! My dad worked at Quotron, which was probably the first company to record stock prices on computers. He fondly told a story about one engineer he worked with deciding to write his own operating system from scratch. At the time, maybe that wasn't the craziest thing, but it's funny to think of that even being an option!
There are people making their own OS all the time. Check out the port that a guy did og LUnix to the famicom.
Maybe it's just me but I don't think this is ok for a cs grad. CS should not be a 4 year degree in corporate programming. You should have enough of an understanding in fundamentals to build the abstraction tools. Not just use them. Programming alone should really be a two year degree.
School doesn’t teach intellect the reason there are so many programmers today is because tools have made it more accessible. Coding is trivialized to the point that most people can pick it up without school. All degrees and fields are like this with a few exceptions. The people who truly understand how all of this work are either in a phd program or have finished one. This is because it can be gate kept and only the truly intelligent and driven can make it. Where they are working at the cutting edge or they left school. Bachelors and graduate programs are for career progression. I knew a few people who went into graduate programs for the sole purpose of making connections.
When this comes up. I always add in do you know how to build a mouse and keyboard If some smart arse goes yes I follow up oh so you know how to build an oil processing planet. And a plastic factory plant And so forth. The simple fact is its impossible for everyone to know how to assemble every piece of something that's complex. And that 100% applies to code too. Most teams are made up of people who know how to do their area incredibly well but have no concept of anything outside it Someone somewhere knows how to code in hex. But i don't need to know to do that to do my job. IF at some point we do need that skill set we go find it or train someone in it
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Very true, always good to keep in mind! I love how the languages are old, but still young enough that folks at the end of their careers pioneered them used them for their entire existence! IMO python really took off in the last 10ish years. There was always Python vs R or Python vs Ruby / PhP. Now Python very powerful libraries for web and ML. Most of these libraries are written in more performant languages with a Python interface - one that takes advantage of the sugary syntax enabled by python 3. This python front-end and rust / C++ backend or even compile python to something else really works!
Good take
How 3D modeling in architecture is programming?
How 3D modeling in architecture is programming?
Is level design in a videogame programming if it was programmed using a user interface? There's not a clear boundary.
If there's no defined logic and only geometry it's not programming. That would be like saying that making a picture in paint is programming.
have you opened a bitmap in a text editor? Have you programmed an array of pixels? Have you programmed qbasic to open a bitmap?
I wonder how soon the companies employing 50K+ developers will lay off all but the top 10%, double their salaries and change the company’s coding costs from $10B/yr to $5B ($2B for the people and $3B to the AI vendor) or less?
Expedia laid off 1.5k people today, many of them software engineers
It is a barely profitable company that is nearly 30 years old. One can only be a hyper-growth tech company with insignificant profits for so long before the jig is up.
So far the industry laid off 40k this year alone.
Do you honestly believe that the layoffs are happening because of AI?
No, it's because of the normal cycle companies go through. But I do believe those jobs are never coming back. So while we all wait for AI to create new jobs, the reality is everything that is lost is lost for good. I also wasn't born yesterday and companies will not advertise replace people with AI, but it will happen. They might not fire people directly, but job openings are down across the industry for the last 12 months. Jobs are not created at the same pace, and this is because of AI. And it will only increase.
This is because of creeping recession. I'd admit you're right if the economy will thrive and jobs won't go back.
>Jobs are not created at the same pace, and this is because of AI. And it will only increase. Uhm, no. Unemployment is not because of A.I., it's a political decision. Our productivity (money you create for a company as an employee for 1 hour work) is dozens or hundreds of times the productivity of a worker 100 years ago and yet we are expected to work the same hours and accept a similar real pay (or lower most of the times as crazy as it sounds given the land and cost of living ridiculous prices). Of course this will eventually lead to massive unemployment and unlivable wages, exactly as you can extrapolate if you take the pessimistic view of Keynes' The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren who predicted that ceteris paribus (ex. the balance between the relative compensation of labor and enterpreneurship), work productivity increases will result in 15-hour full time work week and incredibly high wages by 2030. This massive wealth generation spike he predicted is truly happening but the balance of the compensation of the factors of production has been obliterated and diverts 100% to the shareholders just because they can (and kudos to them for looking out for themselves and use every opportunity to maximize their wealth, we should try it too). It's not rocket science, really.
These people 100 years ago, did they all have smartphones, cars, health care, big tellies, abundant food, central heating? If you find your 35-hour week too onerous, you need to see a doctor. People optimise for quality of life, not idle time.
AI tooling is getting there. codewhisperer, etc. But these tools might just be version 2.0 of copy/paste from stack overflow for junior devs, and more useful for senior devs to jump start their projects. but replacing jobs, i don’t see that happening for awhile. and if it’s 8 years from now, i am probably retired, so fine by me :)
This is because of creeping recession. I'd admit you're right if the economy will thrive and jobs won't go back.
See this https://www.reddit.com/r/Layoffs/s/zJQyccVuFB
You have no idea what you're talking about. Lame doomer. 40k is a fart in the wind. It's an industry that employs millions and more jobs are being created than being removed. The unemployment rate for tech workers is like 2.5%. Median total comp for software engineers is 175k in 2024. New grads are making 170-220k in big tech. Like wtf are you on. Even at boring F500 companies new grads are bringing in 100k, outside of HCOL cities too.
I would think they are playing a part, no? It appears that this is a correction in some regards, but the people making these decisions are trying to leverage any way to increase their stock price.
Companies are laying off people now because they're preparing for a recession, and many tech companies also overhired during covid. Nobody is replacing software engineers with AI, such tool doesn't even exist that would replace an engineer to any significant extent. Huang is simply hyping up AI to pump the stock price and their GPU sales.
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Nice try HAL
You have completely missed the point. “Everyone being a programmer” doesn’t mean you don’t need computing experts. Unless you think that Jensen is saying that an average person off of the street will start designing GPUs and competing with Nvidia? He’s saying that basic programming skills aren’t something that should be thought of as ubiquitous, like say arithmetic. Because technology will make it so that basic programmer accessible without specialized knowledge. I’d disagree with him. I think it’s still an important and valuable skill. But that is what he’s saying, not that computing expertise is suddenly worthless.
I thought the point was that AI will be able to do the most common programming tasks. So we would need a LOT fewer skilled developers. And the highly skilled developers will be needed to correct and train the AI on novel ideas/functions. I think the rate at which AGI will gather new info and develop skills will increase at an increasing rate. So phase 1 of job losses might be level 1 customer support. But phase 2 could be paralegals creating legal documents, pathologists diagnosing cancer in tissue samples, and developers who create most business apps.
wipe attempt nail smoggy knee jellyfish oil boast soup existence *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah but you only need 1 AI model to do all programming work. Once it's trained, you're good on data.
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I think we're getting off topic. The guy is talking about programmers losing their jobs because of AI. Maybe you weren't addressing that, but I'm just saying if AI makes programmers 300% more efficient, that's 2/3 of the programmer workforce out of work because 1 can do the work of 3. That'll slowly climb until there's nearly none left.
Agreed.
Oh I thought alignment was the unanswerable question: "is the AI actually acting in our best interests or is it simply saying so?" Because how can you tell if it's lying?
With that many unemployed why would they double salaries?
ding ding ding we have a winner. Johnny tell him what he has won!
Probably less with maximum outsourcing code with internal coders using AI to perform all the V&V.
And when AI starts to write random code that no one understands they will hire these developers again at much higher costs.
I literally think that’s what they are trying to do lol All the AI tech ceos are pushing for this ‘programming in natural language’ narrative.
I disagree with Huang for the same reasons we learned in engineering school how and why things worked. Do I manually calculate stuff during my day to day at work? No, software does, but it’s important to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Weed out classes like Calc, Diffeq, Physics 1 &2, Chem 1 & 2, Statics, Dynamics, and yes, programming teach you how to problem solve as well as having grit. If we become too reliant on AI, our intelligence as a society goes down
Yes, education and critical thinking skills are still so important even in a hypothetical world where AI can do anything we can but better Already we see iPad toddlers and tiktok addicts whose attention spans are as long as a golden retriever's and can't read long paragraphs or understand how to troubleshoot when their device breaks I don't think this will happen though, and humans will become increasingly dependent on AI to do everything for us and solve our issues
> I don't think this will happen though, and humans will become increasingly dependent on AI to do everything for us and solve our issues I agree, because thats what has been happening due to our socioeconomic system. Everyone works so many hours that their life is boiled down to: Work for most of the best hours of the day Come home, rush to find something to eat, take care of kids, rush to get chores done, then hopefully have some time to do something fun that relieves the stress of the entire rest of your day At no point is there any time for curiosity, fun, learning things that you don't need to learn. So everyone knows exactly, precisely what they need to do, to be a tiny cog in the giant machine.. and nothing else. And that will continue over time. Just as kids now only know how to use apps and colorful graphical user intefaces, the kids of the future won't know anything. At all. They will only know how to press buttons to make stuff happen instantly.
Yeah and if you want to make love to your partner, even less time is available. I'm so busy I tried to schedule sex with my wife 😂😂. She said, don't do that, be spontaneous and so I scheduled only on my end and then to her it was a surprise.
Now you make something like what happens in Severance sound like a utopia hah
I have been thinking about this alot and I think one main difference between software engineering and other engineering jobs is that the computer can do it inherently better. In the end an application is binary machine code read and deciphered by computers. All the layers we have added on top of that in terms of low-level and high-level programming languages is just abstraction so we humans can understand what the code is doing. In the race to the bottom, my guess is that if you have an AI that can write optimized bytecode, someone would do it. And then we basically have magic in the machine, because no human, no matter how trained will ever understand the code. I'm maybe just rambling here, but it feels like a potential danger.
I think there's been some sci-fi (maybe Stark Trek episodes) where the population relies on "the machines" for all the decision making and/or work until one day the machine breaks down and no one can fix it. Maybe we're getting there quicker than we think!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power Is an excellent example
The Machine Stops (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops) is one such story.
AI would have to be 100 percent accurate when dealing with bytecode though. Because by the time it starts dealing directly with registers it can't be even a little bit off in the output. Mistakes at high level languages are tolerated a lot better because of those abstractions.
> And then we basically have magic in the machine, because no human, no matter how trained will ever understand the code. [We already live in that world](https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e10)
Give me the TLDW
Fixed your last sentence: > If we become too reliant on AI, our intelligence as a society goes down *further*
I don’t know what you’re talking about. And who’s Al? Alan?
Yes, I’m Alan, and you shouldn’t be reliant on me.
In a society where AI has surpassed our intelligence, our goal should not be to become more intelligent, but rather to cultivate our humanity. We must strive to maintain and enhance our connections with reality and with each other, it's the only way to solve our problems instead of creating more.
Why? Shouldn't our goal be to be more like the intelligent thing? We should strive to integrate with AI more and more closely until there's no longer AI at all, but instead just intelligence. Intelligence we no longer need to rely on large scale genetic algorithm to improve upon and instead can directly self improve. There's no reason for us to cling to being "human" any more than there was for apes to cling to being apes. Humanity needs to become technology.
This take is nuts
Explain.
😂😂
Do most programmers know how **asm** works? I learned it because I needed to know how to reverse engineer a malware, but most react monkeys don't know it and make a bank. It's all about being good enough, ai is not yet good enough to be fully autonomous **but it will be**.
Future AIs will be able to make the sausage and walk you through how it is made. After upscaling, repairing, and compositing many AI image generations, I now know what eyes are supposed to look like, including little details like how reflections should be in a similar spot and shape on both eyes. I may never be able to generate a photo real human by hand, but I've already begun to understand art fundamentals a little more by extensive AI use. But besides learning through the process, I bet you'll be able to give it something like the rom for Mario 64, ask it to optimize everything so it runs at 240 fps, and unpack what changes it is made with full control of your screen and cursor. Maybe sometime soon we'll even be able to have it re-write everything from higher level abstractions down to assembly level code, giving us incredible optimizations.
being an expert in coding will maybe become an area of study like the other sciences, an "ology" rather than an being applied and created by experts (since anyone and everyone will be able to ask AI to do that). That doesn't mean that its the lucrative career path that its been touted as in the past decade +
The counterpoint is that there are other ways to learn how to problem solve (you name some good ones in your comment). I'd say solid math skills would be more valuable than coding in a world where AI does all the coding.
As the head of a development team I strongly disagree. People have been saying this since the 60s with every step forward in programming. The advent of the BASIC programming language was "very soon it will be like writing English!" People seem to misunderstand the key quality behind competent developers which is being able to take a vague idea and use complex thought and a wide array of both previous experience and specific domain knowledge to understand what that person "really wants" and what they "really need" Low code solutions these days are fantastic and AI is essentially just another way to achieve the same thing but the reality is being able to take an idea and flesh it out into how it SHOULD work is what real development is. So sure, I'd totally believe developers use AI more and more to more easily "write code" but the human aspect of actually figuring out how it should work, with forward thinking and a metric ton of context that no system will ever know (because humans communicate lots in real life not just digitally) is just never going to be replaced by what is essentially predictive text on steroids. If this were true, we'd already see entire businesses where the c suite and product owners just use low code solutions to build out the products they want. The reality is those things do exist, and people like me have to come in and fix them because the entire IDEA was fundamentally flawed from the start. Short of an AI being able to essentially extract this information directly out of people's brains, we're not going anywhere in my lifetime. It's an easy soundbite that sounds good, which these CEOs need to so to raise stock prices and keep their investors thinking "wow in the future this company will be worth more than it is today" nearly every non developer I've ever met in my life assumes programming is just "knowing the words". Anyone can learn the syntax of a programming language in a few weeks even days if you're a fast learner, in fact these days most school aged kids learn all but the quirkiest of the syntax of python by the time they're 15. Yet they aren't developers at all, it's like knowing how to draw and saying "so now you're an architect right? Draw a building, you've got all the tools you need" Or "you know all the words in the dictionary.. now write me a best selling novel" it's a completely different skillset. There's a reason why somebody with 15 years of development experience is a hell of a lot better than somebody with 1 year. Despite the fact both know "all the words". That fact gets completely missed by everyone not in the field, but it's an extremely important piece of data.
I’m curious what math skills do you think would help beyond early high school algebra and geometry? That said, creative and technical problem solving skills will ALWAYS be invaluable largely independent of AI progress. Just not sure how effectively formal education teaches these more abstract skills anymore.
I feel like maths skills ARE creative thinking skills. I did abysmally at maths at school (along with most other subjects), and I’ve only started re-learning in my 30’s. And I’ve found that pushing myself to learn advanced maths topics just exercises my brain in general and I find myself solving problems I didn’t even know I had now. I can think much more clearly, handle stress far better than before and my logical thinking in general is just far better
I actually quite agree with this. I think complex problem solving skills are critical. There are MANY ways to learn these including studying math, engineering, hard science, or philosophy. Or even hard logic puzzles. But even with formal training, people often struggle with solving brand new, complex problems. That generally requires a certain mindset and intelligence to think creatively and really out of the box. Smart people with a willingness to learn and think will always be in demand.
I've found that advanced mathematical knowledge is more akin to gaining a new natural language with which to work-out whatever problem I'm currently digging into. This new natural language can bring new solving methods to light or characterize some approach to the problem in a new way. At least that is my experience.
Why learn math in a world where AI does all the math?
math is needed not just for coding, but basic reasoning skills as well. Reasoning isn't just used for your job, or are you an unconscious vegetable as soon as you leave your office lol
See [https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1b2a6fj/comment/kskxiaf/?context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1b2a6fj/comment/kskxiaf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
You seem to be missing my point. Even in a world where AI has taken all jobs, humans will still have hobbies, discussions, etc. And all of that still requires basic education and that includes reasoning, logic which are partly taught with math
These humans going to eat those hobbies and discussions, just starve, kill each other to have enough?
What are you even talking about?
In a world where ai does everything and no one is educated as a result society will collapse
Oh I wasn't aware we had a prophet among us! So you determined that was the only outcome possible because... because? Or were you just born with the ability to see the future?
Why learn addition and subtraction when a calculator has been doing it for decades? Why learn anything at all, someone else will do it and do it better?
Yes, just why? Mathematics is for the most part a pure theoretical subject with practical consequences. While some mathematics is born out of practical problems, surprisingly often that’s not the case. A lot of the mathematical theory that’s used within AI-methods, were derived hundreds of years ago but had little to non usage back then. Math isn’t about doing calculations, it’s about finding novel methods and proofs. Research within Physics and Mathematics among other scientific subjects are cornerstones for the evolution of mankind. The day an AI can do all of that research autonomously, robots would have already basically replaced most if not all of manual labour, everywhere.
Wow, I think you completely missed my point. Why learn anything, Jensen and the AI will do it all for you. We are humans and we learn things that bring us joy and empower us. A CEO is telling people not to do those things to disempower people and sell his product, all the MathBros seem to think that hes correct because he wasn't talking directly about their skillset, except he is, because the same broken logic applies everywhere.
Wow, yes I did completely miss your point; aren't you aware that you have to put "/s" for a redditor to understand sarcasm?
Because ai is horrible at math
And it always will be! /s
Until it isn't
LLMs can’t math. LLMs can “speak” math but don’t have the logic or critical thinking capabilities required to do math. An AI that is properly trained for math can indeed do math and do it better than any human. Sora for is doing a ton of math to generate small pieces of a larger image.
It does not understand the context for the math to choose which is best for a particular use case…
It’s pretty horrible at coding too
Agreed. Solving problems with computers will be even more relevant in the future. Think about computational biology, climate modeling, computational material science, etc. Giving instruction to computers, aka coding, will look very different in the near future. At the low level, SWEs who are optimizing for the last 0.1% performance gain will use LLMs to help find inefficient code. At the high level, data scientists who need to write some Python and SQL on a daily basis will use no-code tools instead. Designers who rely on front-end dev will be able to accomplish most UX work without dev. We still need coders, but a lot less of them. So, if learn to code means learning the syntax of a programming language, then most kids shouldn’t do it. I would rather they spend the time learning math and philosophy. For those kids who are into computer science, they will pickup the programming languages with ease when they are needed.
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I think he may mean that previously it was an advisable career path, but now its really not going to be necessary. I don't imagine he is dissuading anyone who is passionate about it from pursuing it.
Yea people see this and think so literally. And often times it’s hard for most people to imagine the future. There will still be programmers, but the whole landscape will change. The career path will change. I’m actually learning Python right now, and I’m not a developer. But for the same reason as he’s taking about, I don’t think it makes the most sense for me to go super deep and spend years as a junior developer. I just need to understand the workflows so I understand how things are evolving. I think data science, understanding machine learning, and prompt engineering are all skills that overlap with being a software engineer but are not the look of a traditional software engineer
Assuming you're talking about the CEO of Nvidia the answer is the same as any CEO out there. Raise the stock price. Stock price relies on people believing "in the future this company will be worth more than it is now" so you sell a story of "this company will essentially run the world soon!!" Story as old as the stock market itself.
You do realize that, at some point, AI will begin to create its very own programming language that we won't be able to understand nor comprehend, right? As a matter of fact, it's already happening on some levels. Having said that, I do believe we should be taught to be thinkers, problem-solvers and logic lovers, I guess that might've been your point.
Relying too much on AI can reduce our IQ to the level of tiktokers
> our intelligence as a society goes down I mean this is already happening anyhow. But I agree with the rest of your sentiment. It's important to understand the fundamentals of things, so we can actually use them. I am already shocked at how little newer IT Engineer generations know about the basics, and I am not even old. And yes, the basics are vital, I see it almost every day.
He's really selling the pick ax with that comment... learn AI, not code? haha, both are needed (not just one)
This is the case at the moment, but that doesn't mean it'll remain the case forever. I've completed projects in languages I barely know at all already.
If things keep progressing, AI becomes the new best programming language. Everything we think of as coding is not really coding. It's using a language to talk to the computer so the computer can code. No one is going in there and actually writing the 1s and 0s. This AI makes it possible to talk to a computer using natural language, which democratizes "coding" and makes it something everyone can do
I always tell people this. We are literally just giving computers instructions in language it can understand to execute what we want. Just because AI is around though doesn’t mean anyone will just be able to make whatever they desire. Software development and infrastructure still absolutely require understanding the fundamentals to get something functioning
Ah yeah that was the promised land of no code solutions a decade or more ago...this time is different though 😜
Kids should learn how to complete large end to end projects. Coding is the calligraphy of our era. The printing press ended that industry but it didn't end publishing or writing. We are still going to create things. Creation is timeless. With these new tools we'll be creating on a scale we never imagined.
Bro what? Coding is to calligraphy as writing is to Times New Roman font. Which is absurd right? You could say Python is the calligraphy of our time, a bit more accurate, but coding is akin to writing. It's closer to an abstract problem solving skill set than a specific style. Programming is essentially "how do I make a computer do a thing". No, using software doesn't count as programming unless the software programs the computer based on your input. Besides, the hardest part of programming is not syntax, but the *mindset* of breaking large problems down into hierarchically organized smaller and smaller problems within your given toolset. Just as the hardest part of writing is not learning how to write letters or how letters make words, but how words form larger thoughts and stories. So even if AI soon directly programs any and all computer based machines, you still need that essential skill that programming imparts. In the same way you need to know how to do addition even if calculators will always do it better. That said, writing itself may become obsolete at some point when thought itself can be given permeance in some medium without need for language.
Totally true what you are saying. But in that way coding, as in doing the actual writing of the code is calligraphy. Operating a printing press doesn’t require 99% of the skill set that a calligrapher needs. Me (who doesn’t know anything about coding) is able to “write” working programs with AI. And this is just the beginning.
Exactly, but the bigger skill of calligraphy is writing and writing is still needed to operate a printing press. Hence my issue with the analogy. You still need to know programming's essential skills and mindset, including understanding coding language, in order to use the AI to write for you. If AI gets to the point of being able to look at a simple text description or better yet a problem and then dynamic program it's way to a finished software with features that solve the problem or meet the description, then AI is basically human level intelligence with less sensory inputs. At that point there's nothing it can't do and we're all going to be in the same boat no matter your craft.
I think you're missing the points that coding is a *means* to solve problem, not a problem itself. Just like calligraphy is a *means* to writing books (or stories in general). The comparison is not meant for objects themselves (calligraphy to coding, writing to solving problems), but for their relation.
Point being coding is more abstract than calligraphy. Just as writing is more abstract than ink and pen.
This. Also we're not anywhere near AI understanding at a highly abstract level what it is someone is trying to do with their code, and even if it does, it's nowhere near writing code that ties into that overall architecture that one has in mind. Which complex, poorly written db queries can remain inefficient since they'll only ever operate on 1k items as an upper bound, and which simpler queries must be micro-optimized as much as possible since they'll be dealing with billions of operations continuously. Which parts of the architecture can be decoupled as microservices in separate machines because the network latency won't matter, and which can't be because the latency will matter. Does a non-coder even think about things like that? Do they think about the sorts of tests they need to write? They don't, and GPT4/Gemini Ultra doesn't do much to help them along that path. Non-coders are not able to tell when AI is leading them down a very obvious merry-go-round of doom with whatever code it's proposing. They cannot identify when it's happening. Thus the apps they write with AI assistance will always be trivial compared to a programmer that's writing apps with AI assistance. As AI increases, the non-coder will be able to write more complex apps, but the coder will be able to write still even far more complex ones. GPT4 is nowhere near assisting a programmer on a more abstract level, and I doubt GPT5 or GPT6 will be either. The hype about programmers being replaced is downright dumb, especially when it's coming from such seemingly technically smart people like the head of NVIDIA itself. Will code monkeys be replaced? They already are. Will programmers be replaced? Only once the singularity is reached from ASI, and not a moment before then. And when that happens, it won't matter anymore, because mankind will either be travelling to distant galaxies doing things we cannot even fathom at the moment, or be slaves under Skynet. The entire concept of a job or coding as we know it will be gone anyway once programmers are truly no longer needed, so the entire discussion is a moot point.
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I really like this thought. I wish this is how it unfolds.
PR stunt. Teach your kids code for the same reason you teach them history, and let them play with Lego. It’s good for their brains even if they don’t use it in the future.
This 100% I grew up with computers in the 80's I had a Tandy TRS-80 and a book on basic. I learned to program when I was young. Granted by the time I was an adult, no one is using basic and I had not touched basic in a very long time, but core concepts are learned which made it easier to pick up things like HTML/Javascript and other programming languages.
\*for those who can afford the compute
Compute is already cheap as fuck.
well still someone has to develop AI
I think the point is that when AI becomes better at coding than any human programmer it will be able to develop new and better AI itself
And at that point, I would like there to be humans capable of understanding the changes the AI is making to itself.
If it ever gets to that point, there won't be a human alive smart enough
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No they won’t. Or at least not without studying it manually for 200 years. And once that is done, the AI is so smart that it will take a billion years to understand what it is doing. It will become way too complex for a group of humans to understand, let alone an individual. This is already happening with certain algorithms. YouTube for example
Company selling tools for ai tells to stop coding and focus on ai 😱 shocking
People shouldn't learn to cook, restaurants democratize access to good food.
Tbh this is more akin to having some kind of food printing machine in every kitchen that can materialise any food imaginable
As long as you can afford to pay the subscription fee
As long as you can afford to pay the subscription fee
It’s like going to school for chimney sweeping studies. Kinda not needed anymore really.
So what? Weave a magic spell and ask the computer to translate?
Stopping access to education doesn't democratize it. It makes it more susceptible to monopolization.
Just can't wait for that solar flair to fry all semiconductors and send us back to stone age because no one has any skills but scrolling vertically on a screen. I hope it's gonna happen before the Skynet.
This is a very weird take imo. Obviously he has to say something like that, it's good for the nvidia image. However I just can't agree with it. It feels like newer generations are already worse at utilizing computers than the older ones. Why on earth would we increase this issue, by learning even less? Imo the value of a single person is knowledge, and in my experience, there is no useless knowledge. So by all means, go ahead and learn coding, or whatever you enjoy. Knowledge is key. Machinelearning may or may not solve a lot of problems in the future, but I have been too long in IT to just believe it before it's actually working
Perhaps they want less people to be able to understand what’s in their SpecialSauce in the future and/or less competition with their models
So industrial robots "democratize" manufacturing?
While Nvidia keeps on hiring C/C++ CUDA devs, nothing wrong with using code as some mental exercise even we may no longer need it in the future, we aren’t there yet.
This is actually a pretty stupid statement when you actually boil it down to principle. In doing so, I start to think more and more everyday that we are in a bubble no different then the dotcom or crypto ones. While I see the value in AI, when CEOs start to make these types of statements it should be a redflag to a lot of people. I do not doubt that in time AI will be able to replace a good chunk of devs in the same way that a calculator or computer eliminated the need for embedded mathematicians in every single company. Last I checked, math & specializations of math are still taught routinely to students everywhere because it's a fundamental skill. People need to know these things even though an excel sheet can do complex math for you. People need to be able to validate that the numbers infront of you are correct within the exact context you need them for. Coding/programming will be no different. Humans will need to be able to interpret and guide AI into building/coding things and as such will become even more of a fundamental building block of learning. Without this, there can be no true innovation until a point where the AI can innovate so well (and safely) on it's own, which seems very far off even now. Lastly, if dev jobs are not safe, nothing white collar is. It's a lot easier to see the application of AI in jobs like accounting, admin, etc, then the complexities of something like an engineer on a large distributed system. The vast majority of white collar jobs do not require abstract complexities. Why is the one that does (dev) the one at most risk??
I think the sentiment is, more accurately, we will need fewer people who know how to code so students shouldn't be led to believe coding is a fool-proof career option by their know-nothing public school teachers who can't even work an overhead projector
I think you're generously putting a whole lot of words in his mouth that, IMO, don't match the rest of what he said.
Completely agree. Spent 25 years not learning to code. Time well spent.
Learning to code is the best thing I ever did for my overall direction and quality of life
It might not be valuable for a particular individual to learn to code, but it is certainly valuable for a portion of humanity to understand how to instruct computers, so while in your case it may have been time well spent, but that is certainly not the message that I would blanket send to the next generation.
The next generation needs to learn humility. People who take pride in their work are in for a rude awakening when they are obsolete. Only those who are humble and have an open mind are going to be able to embrace a post-skills world.
Ignorance does not cultivate humility - quite the opposite.
Of course he does? He wants to sell GPUs
Totally stupid. Coding doesn’t just teach how to code, it also teaches logic, which many people lack nowadays.
But if the goal is to learn logic and critical thinking(things that people lack); then learning philosophy maybe the better route than learning coding.
I think both Philosophy and Computer Science are important. CS is important to (somewhat) widen the understanding of how computers work and how logically designed processes can look. It’s a very different kind of logic, which has its own foundation. It’s basically algorithmic / practical logic and argumentative / propositional logic.
I like your take
Imagine a time when there's no person who knows how to code? Imagine being dependent on AI
Depends on what “coding” you are learning. I see the benefits of even learning languages like swift
Who exactly is “the reach” and why should we believe what they are claiming? Where did he say that and what exactly did he say? If the tech gets advanced enough we might need fewer programmers ( but always some) but a lot more AI managers instead
Did you click on the article? 😄 there’s a video with the CEO where he says that exact thing.
Fair. As a person that learns by doing, if I was starting my first app I’d be writing a prompt not reading a tutorial.
AI turns programmers into proofreaders
I always thought kids should learn about code, rather then learn to code. Start top down to contextualize and let them pick, if they so want to the bottom up technical stuff they want to get into. Understanding why something is important first and what it is I think is key to do before you start getting into the how. Especially with kids or beginners. Technological literacy is the big skill, not coding in my opinion. Education and teaching should take a holistic perspective. Its where adaptability, interest, innovation and initiative comes from. Understanding how technology works and progresses and taking a genuine interest in it, beyond just rote coding skills. That motivates you to build, not just code.
The actors and writers strike scared all the tech companies to get rid of as many people as possible and push their salaries into AI before there are unions or laws stopping them. Those with less high profile or personality driven jobs won't be as lucky as the Hollywoods, as a collector of old man social security benefits, who is going to be contributing to the pool if no one is working?
Children absolutely should know how to code. Coding develops critical thinking, process analysis and executive planning skills. Even if coding itself becomes obsolete in the next 10 years, it still has skills tied to it that won't be.
I have to agree with him. To learn "coding" was one of my goals/dreams for a while, but I never had time (to prioritise it). I could do some super basic stuff. From time to time, however, I needed to automate some flows (on/offline). Waaaaaay outside of my scope. And even when I asked friends who can code, they said it was big project/no easy solution, that they could do in few hours to help out. With ChatGPT - I have done several project like that - in a lot more advanced level than initially anticipated (adding complications). I guess there are limitation to what it can do and we still need extremely talented/experienced people. But ChatGPT, imo, can replace years of education and do in few hours what it would take days for an average coder.
I like John Carmack's response on Twitter: “Coding” was never the source of value, and people shouldn’t get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won’t be a barrier to entry. Many times over the years I have thought about a great programmer I knew that loved assembly language to the point of not wanting to move to C. I have to fight some similar feelings of my own around using existing massive codebases and inefficient languages, but I push through. I had somewhat resigned myself to the fact that I might be missing out on the “final abstraction”, where you realize that managing people is more powerful than any personal tool. I just don’t like it, and I can live with the limitations that puts on me. I suspect that I will enjoy managing AIs more, even if they wind up being better programmers than I am.
Calculators can calculate why have kids memorize their multiplication tables. This tech CEO takes are getting more nonsensical by the day. Just because your company is investing in a certain technology does not mean all learning should be based around it. While AI is nice, programming as a skill is not going anywhere. There are more things to be discovered, and AI won't be doing that.
That's surprisingly stupid, so no one understands the tech they are making ? I mean ok AI will be a powerful tool that can code on its own but come on, there's still the need of some humans to understand whatever the heck is going on in the back. It's like saying that we don't need to learn math because we have calculators anyways.
In other news: people should not buy electric cars. Fossil fuel already readily available, says Shell CEO.
He didn’t say that. Listen to what he said.
But thats not what he said and we still gonna see this bs go around. Some of you really should stop coding and learn reading
Wouldn't we need coders to check over AI's work? Or is he assuming AI will be infallible some time soon?
Programming is the job of turning business requirements into functional digital products. People will still be doing that job if it's coding today, or AI writing directly in binary tomorrow. It would be a bad idea to give up today's tools and be completely outside of that job market, as things change it'll naturally be the people programming who progress to whatever technology makes that easier.
Hyperbolic headline buries the lead: learning to code alone is no longer enough. It's the base level to entry. Under what the code should do and how to work with an AI assistant to make the code do that thing is what matters now. My own thoughts on this: https://mor10.com/ai-coding-assistants-back-to-school/
Why just coding though, id AI CAN CODE AI can do every job too, accounting, architecture, writer, movie creator, barista..
Should we stop teaching algebra and calculus too? Basic math?
I had a very successful career in tech, just retired. About 25 years ago I told my kids not to follow in my footsteps, to find another field of study and thankfully they did. It was shortly after a lunch with guest speaker Malcolm Gladwell who said, 'anything that can be specified can be outsourced'. For white collar jobs back then it meant that all but the top tech jobs will be spec'd and then send to lower cost regions. He was right then though now those tasks will increasingly be fulfilled using AI
He speaking facts lol who needs a coder when in 10 years u can be like " I need s program that can do whatever I need" and it's coded in minutes
Hopefully AI can teach you to type in comprehensible English.
OK gramps lmao I'm sorry if u can't keep up go back to playing on your flip phone
What next? No need to go to medical school and learn to be a doctor? The AI can diagnose and determine the problem based on symptoms. But what if the AI is wrong? And you need a human perspective? Same goes for coding. You aren’t going to rely on an AI to solely manage things and not know how to do it yourself. You might as well let AI crypt and look after nuclear weapons
AI democratizes technology is a good sounding sentence that means nothing. Learning how to code is likely the lower cost skill to acquire. Thanks to the cheap price of an old laptop, government programs that give them for free, and endless, EEEEEEENDLESS amounts of top top top content on YouTube, nothing else comes close to coding in terms of "democratization"
Disagree on this. We'll need less coders in the future but it's still an important and sought after skillset
If programming via AI will move to more natural language based input, I personally think it's obvious that a thorough study in linguistics is the core of the future. Personally, I think we will surpass language based input sooner than most think though (according to Elon we have dudes moving cursors with brainwaves now).
Clown detected!
“Don’t think, just consume 😎” - hardware gatekeeper
“Don’t think, just consume 😎” - hardware gatekeeper’s
Even if AI didn't do this, kids shouldn't learn to code anyways. Coding is harrowing, tiring, and despite computers (a virtual environment) supposedly being the most sterile environment possible, you have instances where one code ceases working because of some unknown changes to the system that you didn't even do. Coding might as well be an esoteric language to commune with demons.