Developers, your days of typing out lines of code may be numbered. At least that’s what Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, thinks. In a leaked recording from an internal fireside chat, Garman dropped a bombshell: within around 24 months, most developers won’t be coding anymore.
If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time—I can’t exactly predict where it is—it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” Garman said, according to a Business Insider report.
And it’s not just Garman who believes this is the future that humanity is building. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI will make “everyone a programmer,” without the need to know a single thing about coding, while Microsoft’s Satya Nadella predicted that AI will create a billion new developers by leveraging the exact same premise.
And just last year, Emad Mostaque, former CEO of Stability AI, predicted that “there will be no programmers in five years.” He envisioned a future where AI models run locally on smartphones, eliminating the need for internet connectivity—a vision that turned into a reality sooner than expected, with Google Pixel running Gemini mini locally and iPhones being capable of running open source LLMs and even generative image models through apps like Draw Things.
But not everyone’s buying into this AI utopia—or dystopia, depending on your job. Garman’s predecessor, Adam Selipsky, said some AI companies are “massively overhyped,” drawing parallels to the dot-com bubble and warning that while AI itself might be transformative, its impact might be overvalued by Wall Street.
The way AWS’s Garman sees it, it’s not about entirely eliminating developers but rather redefining their role. “Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers,” he explained. “It’s not necessarily the skill in and of itself. The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that’s interesting for my end users to use?”
In other words, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy’s predictions of English becoming the hottest programming language in the tech space may be true—and even this is questionable, considering how good LLMs are at translating text.
The hottest new programming language is English
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) January 24, 2023
According to Business Insider, the AWS chief also introduced the concept of “undifferentiated heavy lifting” for developers, where they work across all aspects of software development. Coders could offload the grunt work to AI, Garman said, while concentrating their own brainpower on specialized problems.
But what about the economic impact of a society in which machines take over people’s roles?
While some fear that hundreds of millions of jobs will be lost to AI across the entire labor spectrum in the near future, others see the potential for massive growth. AI is predicted to add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy, and society as a whole will need to adapt. And that will come at some cost: A recent IBM report argues that in the next three years, at least 40% of the world’s working population will require re-skilling training due to the massive adoption of AI technologies.
The question, of course, is whether AI, as it continues to get exponentially smarter, will be able to do the highly creative work as well as the mundane stuff. Given that nearly 70% of business owners would prefer to let robots deal with decision-making tasks, we’re definitely in a beware-of-what-you-wish-for situation.
