Is AI Going to Replace Programmers?
As we are entering the world of AI, everyone is thinking about their profession and whether they have a secure career or not. For me, the situation is the same as I am in the web development sector.
Career Uncertainty in the Age of AI
From the start of ChatGPT, I was very amazed and worried at the same time by seeing the capabilities of this AI. When I commanded it to write code for me in Python, JavaScript, and C++, it wrote the codes without any errors. Then I intentionally made a wrong code and asked it to fix the code and find the bug for me. And obviously, it found the bug. From that day, I was really worried whether I should still pursue my career in web development. At that moment, I was still very new in this career, so I had a huge dilemma about web development and AI. Should I switch my career to AI? I was stunned for almost a month and had zero ideas about which sector would be best for me to switch to.
So then I thought, what if I pursue my career in AI? But then I understood that I have zero interest in statistics and I don’t like data science, so I was not very passionate about AI. Then I started researching whether it could take my job or not. The new update of Gemini by Google, it showed that it could even understand images or what the camera can see and it can even explain the visuals. So, we can pretty much assume that within 5 or 6 years, the world is going to change, and it’s definitely going to be caused by AI.
The Evolving Future of Work
But if we look to the past to see the biggest changes, we can see that in the industrial revolution, there were lots of jobs that were lost due to the uses of machines. Previously, we used to see postmen sending letters to different parts of our country, but right now, after the advent of email, most people don’t even know what a postman does. New technologies will come.
Even right now, we learn how to do math, but we do not do math using pen and paper; we use a calculator or the calculator app on our phones, but still, we learn math.
Recently, the Nvidia CEO said that we should not even learn how to do programming because AI can do it.
Before, we thought that it was not going to take creative jobs, rather it would replace the low-level jobs where we need repetitive work, for example, putting stickers on boxes, which can be done by robots. But after the release of MidJourney and ChatGPT, the whole idea has taken a big leap. And right now, the main thing that we can say about AI is that AI has come and it is not going away in the near future.
By watching the previous trends, we can easily state that there will be huge layoffs, and on the other hand, there will be a huge demand for new jobs that do not exist yet. Right now, we can’t even imagine what kind of jobs will be introduced due to AI, but we can understand that new jobs will be created because of AI. This also happened when the 3G network first became public. We couldn’t even think about video calling before 3G. We couldn’t even understand what the use of Facebook or Instagram would be, but right now, it is a huge part of our daily life.
Programmers say we need coding because it is how we think, understand, and interact with computers. So, even if AI takes away all the jobs in the programming sector, the knowledge will still be required for us. We will need this knowledge for our future. Maybe in the coming years, front-end jobs will be less demanding because where we needed 10 front-end developers, now we might need 2 to 3 front-end developers who can use AI. But we will still need programmers to give the commands.
Embracing Technological Change
Before, when I planned to learn web development, I thought that since WordPress exists, we can just drag and drop to make any website and we don’t even need to do any coding. But when I started learning about WordPress, I understood that WordPress is also not easy. There needs to be lots of editing and setup, and no amateur can do it on the first day.
So, whatever career we think of or whatever things AI can replace, we still need human beings who understand the basics, who understand programming, and who understand what can be created using AI. In any sector, those in managerial positions do not do all the work by themselves. They understand the basics and how things work so they can guide and command the juniors to finish up a project, which a junior cannot do alone. Think of it from the perspective of the manager. For them, we just obey the orders; we act like AI and finish the project. So this is going to happen for all of us now. We will be the masters who give commands and finish huge tasks. So it is better that we have knowledge of various fields. Otherwise, there is a high chance that those who do not adapt will be replaced.