Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…A lot of people have written to me, I think a lot of developers, programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession in the context of quickly improving AI systems. So do you think AI will eventually replace programmers? The hard part about that phrase is you use the term eventually, meaning do I think in five years, 10 years, a hundred years? What does that term actually mean? I think at some point if all things continue at the current rate of improvement, there does come a point where programming as a hard skill does become unnecessary. At some eventual point, way, way down the road, yes. I don’t know what that point looks like. I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I don’t even attempt to make predictions about that. But there are still some leaps and bounds we need to make. I mean even just societally, there’s plenty of companies that don’t even allow you to use AI. I mean, there’s just practical problems that exist. So that’s a question I just try not to answer in the direct sense. There will come a day if humanity continues and all things continue in a good positive direction, where a lot of skills will go out the window due to immense computing systems. So, yeah, I’ll give you that one. But it’s just like if I don’t think it has anything in the near term, there’s been no computer improvement up to this date that did not result in more jobs. Yeah, absolutely. I would say that I think it depends how you define programming also, because when the community moves from assembly to C, from C to, I don’t know, Python and JavaScript, that’s evolution. That’s really painful for a lot of people who are used to programming that lower-level language, so there’s going to be a continuous evolution. And maybe that means with AI, there’s going to be more and more evolution towards natural language as part of the tool chain like being able to learn how to write proper prompts. Yeah, because natural language is still a language. And in the long term, it’s possible that a large percentage of programming is natural language. There are probably still going to be some percentage that’s not, that’s going to be extremely structured language.…

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