At a recent international conference, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a compelling forecast that he believes that AI will take on 90% of the code writing work in the next three to six months. If this trend continues, AI may almost completely replace human programmers' jobs in 12 months, Amodi said. He pointed out that although programmers still need to set specific conditions and goals for AI, this process may also be replaced by technology in the future.
Amodi believes that although artificial intelligence will gradually replace some human work, it will also prompt us to re-examine the effective use of human resources. He pointed out that the current thinking mode is already difficult to adapt to future development, so we need to conduct profound reflections on "usefulness" and "uselessness".
However, not all tech leaders agree with Amodi. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said at the SXSW conference that he was reserved about Amodi's timeline and forecast. He believes that AI can write codes closer to 20% to 30%, rather than 90%. Krishna pointed out that while automation technology can indeed improve efficiency in some simple programming tasks, AI is still difficult to replace human intelligence in many complex tasks.
In addition, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg expressed a similar view. He believes that while AI will bring about changes, it may take until 2025 to really make the job of software engineers fundamentally change. He hopes Meta will take the lead in this wave of innovation.
Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that more than 25% of the company's new code is currently generated by AI. It is worth noting, however, that despite the strong potential of AI in improving productivity, many large tech companies such as Intel and Tesla have laid off more than 10,000 employees in the past two years. This has raised concerns about the future employment situation in the software development industry.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the software development industry will grow by 17% between 2023 and 2033. In this discussion about AI and programmers’ future, optimism and pessimism are intertwined, which is thought-provoking.