Jensen Huang of NVIDIA urges young ones to NOT pursue coding
There’s been a lot of speculation and anxiety about artificial intelligence before it became mainstream. People discussed how it’s going to change our lives and considered the darkest scenarios popularized by Hollywood. On a more practical level, cohorts of those spending their days typing away at computer keyboards, from coders through designers to copywriters, have been worried about AI kicking them out of business.
Nowadays, AI, or large language models (LLMs), to be accurate, are here, accessible to everyone and widely used in the ever growing number of fields, and some concerns voiced previously actually come true, to this or that degree.
“...everybody in the world is now a programmer.”
You surely remember Elon Musk’s quest against artificial intelligence, when he urged the international community to at least handicap all related projects for half a year. Elon remains certain we’re headed towards something sinister with these new shiny tools. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, isn’t as dramatic about this subject, but at the recent World Government Summit in Dubai, he stated the young generation should not look for a career in programming and choose a path in a completely different field, including biology, manufacturing, farming, or education.
Jensen Huang, president of NVIDIA. Image by NVIDIA Taiwan. Licence CCA2.0. Cropped from original
Specifically, Mr. Huang said: “It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.”
In some applications, AI already is a tool that helps programmers do their job, but it’s more of a “finish this block of code for me” than “write a program that does this and that” situation. Other industries were hit harder: DALL-E 3 by OpenAI was so good at understanding prompts and generating images based thereon that Microsoft, which launched the whole deal through its Bing Image Creator, had to put restraints on the AI. For graphic designers, this arguably spells doom, and the clock is ticking.
Jensen Huang’s words don’t mean programmers will become extinct. Much like with cars, there should always be someone who can look under the hood and adjust the AI, someone meat and bones, otherwise, we may well find ourselves in one of those darker scenarios. Thus, if you’re about to choose/change your career and have been considering coding, aim high, or be ready to face a similar choice several years from now.
