If they are in the sixth grade then it may be 2030 by the time they graduate from high school.
I am working on a website right now that uses OpenAI's models and at the moment it can definitely write and (immediately) deploy simple web pages with interactions and calculations exactly customized by my customers. I am working on the dialogue interface and the text-to-speech and some other things to make it work better. Planning to have a new release at the end of the week. The current version that is up is hard to use since it requires special commands and has some rough edges and uses the non-coding ML model (which can code, but not as well as the code-specific model I am switching to).
Within 3 years I believe that these types of systems will be doing a very significant percentage of programming tasks, both for programmers (as "assistants") and end-users.
Within 7 years I think that programming will have evolved mostly to be directing these types of coding assistants for most use-cases.
The challenging thing though is that kids still need to learn how to read, write, think and problem solve. Despite the fact that AI is starting to be able to do quite a lot of it for us.
They need to learn solid problem solving skills like problem decomposition, how to search/find answers to roadblocks (such as using ChatGPT etc. or other tools like Google and other tools that arise) or just plain persistence, logic, abstraction. The struggle will be getting them to do some of this stuff for themselves rather than cheating like most of their classmates.
But at the same time they absolutely have to learn how to use the new AI tools. It will be critical to stay competitively productive as an adult or just to be able to fit in. There will be important new tools every few months or years.
Where this is really headed in my opinion is by the 2040s high bandwidth brain computer interfaces that tightly integrate cognition with advanced AI systems (2-10 X smarter than humans) start to become commonplace. These will enable different paradigms for communication and society. Before we get to that, AR glasses/goggles will integrate AI deeply into most people's lives.
What is your justification for these estimates? I've been trying to pay attention to what various experts think (I'm not one) and it seems like far from a foregone conclusion that this will be the case, and it might not even be the case that scaling up produces the same outsized benefits we've seen so far.
François Chollet for example seems like someone who is pretty in the know about current SOTA and is not nearly as optimistic best I can tell.
> But at the same time they absolutely have to learn how to use the new AI tools. It will be critical to stay competitively productive as an adult or just to be able to fit in. There will be important new tools every few months or years.
Definitely agree here.
> Where this is really headed in my opinion is by the 2040s high bandwidth brain computer interfaces that tightly integrate cognition with advanced AI systems (2-10 X smarter than humans) start to become commonplace.
My gut feeling is this is pretty insane and unlikely to be the case but I suppose insane things have happened before.
Like I said, my website can already do it to some degree for end users. GitHub CoPilot etc. is very popular for programmers. I am just assuming the models will continue to improve and be deployed.
The only reason to be un-optimistic like that person is if you assume that the model capability will remain essentially static over several years. But even with current models (which new ones are released every few months at this point) there is huge potential for replacing quite a lot of real software engineering work especially when you start putting them in loops and specializing/priming them for particular types of programming.
I am working on a website right now that uses OpenAI's models and at the moment it can definitely write and (immediately) deploy simple web pages with interactions and calculations exactly customized by my customers. I am working on the dialogue interface and the text-to-speech and some other things to make it work better. Planning to have a new release at the end of the week. The current version that is up is hard to use since it requires special commands and has some rough edges and uses the non-coding ML model (which can code, but not as well as the code-specific model I am switching to).
Within 3 years I believe that these types of systems will be doing a very significant percentage of programming tasks, both for programmers (as "assistants") and end-users.
Within 7 years I think that programming will have evolved mostly to be directing these types of coding assistants for most use-cases.
The challenging thing though is that kids still need to learn how to read, write, think and problem solve. Despite the fact that AI is starting to be able to do quite a lot of it for us.
They need to learn solid problem solving skills like problem decomposition, how to search/find answers to roadblocks (such as using ChatGPT etc. or other tools like Google and other tools that arise) or just plain persistence, logic, abstraction. The struggle will be getting them to do some of this stuff for themselves rather than cheating like most of their classmates.
But at the same time they absolutely have to learn how to use the new AI tools. It will be critical to stay competitively productive as an adult or just to be able to fit in. There will be important new tools every few months or years.
Where this is really headed in my opinion is by the 2040s high bandwidth brain computer interfaces that tightly integrate cognition with advanced AI systems (2-10 X smarter than humans) start to become commonplace. These will enable different paradigms for communication and society. Before we get to that, AR glasses/goggles will integrate AI deeply into most people's lives.