With the rapid emergence of generative AI and tools designed to enhance productivity, there’s a rising concern among professionals about their job security.
While speaking about AI taking over jobs, former chief technology officer at OpenAI and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati indicated:
“Some creative jobs maybe will go away. But maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place — you know, if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality.”
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang seemingly shared the same sentiments, claiming coding might already be dead in the water with the rapid prevalence of AI. Instead, he recommended biology, education, manufacturing, or farming as plausible and more secure alternative career options for the next generation.
And now, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has seemingly joined the fray and highlighted software engineering’s high affinity to be automated by AI:
“If I look at coding, programming, which is one area where AI is making the most progress. What we are finding is that we’re 3 to 6 months from a world where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.”
Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei: in the next 3 to 6 months, AI is writing 90% of the code, and in 12 months, nearly all code may be generated by AI from r/singularity
While job security remains a major concern with the broad adoption of AI, Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index report paints a different picture. The report indicated that contrary to popular opinion, AI is creating job opportunities.
However, executives are exclusively recruiting skilled workers with an AI aptitude, prompting “a 142x increase in LinkedIn members adding AI skills like Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles.”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently indicated that AI will replace humans for most things, but certain aspects of life like playing hockey would be preserved for humans. Who’d want to watch computers playing sports?
That said, AI faces critical challenges that prevent its debut at work. For instance, it lacks human touch. As you may know, organizations are hopping onto the AI train in a bid to cut down on operational costs.
Some publications have adopted this trend and laid off most of their staff. However, they are quickly realizing that their efforts are counter-productive, forcing them to hire professionals to correct AI’s erroneous work and add a human touch.
Could hand-written code be replaced by AI soon?
Interestingly, Instagram co-founder and Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger recently echoed Amodei’s sentiments, indicating the role of software engineers is rapidly evolving and that they’d soon start double-checking AI-generated code rather than writing it.
Even Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman claims AI may force software developers to stop coding, prompting them to upskill in the field to gain new skills.
According to Garman:
“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.”
Software engineers affirm a solid future for coding. While AI models show great promise in software engineering, they can’t move past the basic levels of coding.
However, the emergence of proprietary AI models like OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, featuring sophisticated capabilities across math, science, and coding is raising alarm.
According to benchmarks shared, OpenAI o1 and o1-mini are great at coding and have passed OpenAI’s research engineer hiring interview for coding at a 90-100% rate:
“If OpenAI’s o1 can pass OpenAI’s research engineer hiring interview for coding at a 90-100% rate, why would they continue to hire actual human engineers?”
It’ll be interesting to see how AI affects the job market and if it will get to a point where it fully automates coding. Do you think AI can automate software engineering? Share your thoughts in the comments.
