This article is garbage. Look at it carefully. Where is the reasoning? Where is the evidence? It's just one magical claim after magical claim.
Compilers didn't replace coders, they just changed the nature of coding. AI doesn't change coding, but it may change the nature of coding in some ways.
A CEO of a company could theoretically manage directly every single person in his workforce. But he doesn't. Why? Because managing people requires that you understand what they do and how they might be doing it wrong. You need to track their status. Otherwise, things get completely out of control and your plans go nowhere.
Now imagine a perfect AI "coder." How do you manage it? You will have to know how to talk to it and how to understand its behavior. But this is exactly how human coders deal with compilers and libraries today. We will not see ANY replacement of engineers with AI. What we will see is a new category of high-level programming via prompt engineering.
Programmer tools have not, up until now, ever led to a contraction of the software industry. There are more programmers out there than ever before. Advances in technology merely expand what can be done with tech.
Imagine one more thing. Let's say you find a genie lamp and the genie inside gives you three wishes. You COULD makes those wishes yourself. But there are often unhappy side effects. What you need is to go find a Genie Whisperer-- essentially a coder who understands genies; how they think; what they can do; what the pitfalls of dealing with them are. The Genie Whisperer will translate your naive desires into carefully couched language that maximizes the probability of getting what you want.
You see? EVEN IF AI IS LITERALLY MAGIC business people will discover that they should not deal directly with it.
> Compilers didn't replace coders, they just changed the nature of coding. AI doesn't change coding, but it may change the nature of coding in some ways.
This is a poor comparison. AI itself does the coding. GPT-4 can already write code from scratch with high accuracy. At this stage, it still needs a person to review it, but since AI is growing exponentially and can learn how to review code, this will definitely change soon.
And no, this isn't limited to simple coding problems. GPT-4 has been shown to be able to solve complex problems. We're still in the very early stages of AI and it can already do at least 50% of the work by itself, and that's a low estimate.
You are using "coding" as a magic word. Stop that.
My first job was writing machine language without an Assembler, man. THAT'S coding. Then I used an Assembler and the code was written for me, all I had to do was specify it in a language called "6502 Assembly." Then I moved on to C, and the Assembly code was written FOR ME by an amazing thing called a COMPILER. Then I moved on again.
The meaning of "coding" is simply the act of precisely specifying what you want the computer to do, at some level of abstraction. GPT-4 is not "writing code" in the same sense that a human does. It is an automaton performing an elaborate algorithm. Functionally, it's doing what a compiler does, just at a different level of abstraction.
In order to address my argument, you will have to understand the social role of a programmer in a human system. That's the crux of the matter, not arranging text in a file.
>GPT-4 can already write code from scratch with high accuracy
>GPT-4 has been shown to be able to solve complex problems
In GPT-4's own paper, which as always will reflect it in the best light possible, it passes a whopping 1/4th of leetcode "medium" problems still messes up a lot of the easy ones and basically fails all the hard ones.
Those are toy examples mostly aimed at students.
Why do so many of you just rampantly make shit up when talking about this?
Compilers didn't replace coders, they just changed the nature of coding. AI doesn't change coding, but it may change the nature of coding in some ways.
A CEO of a company could theoretically manage directly every single person in his workforce. But he doesn't. Why? Because managing people requires that you understand what they do and how they might be doing it wrong. You need to track their status. Otherwise, things get completely out of control and your plans go nowhere.
Now imagine a perfect AI "coder." How do you manage it? You will have to know how to talk to it and how to understand its behavior. But this is exactly how human coders deal with compilers and libraries today. We will not see ANY replacement of engineers with AI. What we will see is a new category of high-level programming via prompt engineering.
Programmer tools have not, up until now, ever led to a contraction of the software industry. There are more programmers out there than ever before. Advances in technology merely expand what can be done with tech.
Imagine one more thing. Let's say you find a genie lamp and the genie inside gives you three wishes. You COULD makes those wishes yourself. But there are often unhappy side effects. What you need is to go find a Genie Whisperer-- essentially a coder who understands genies; how they think; what they can do; what the pitfalls of dealing with them are. The Genie Whisperer will translate your naive desires into carefully couched language that maximizes the probability of getting what you want.
You see? EVEN IF AI IS LITERALLY MAGIC business people will discover that they should not deal directly with it.