DailyPost 2710
KIDS SHOULDN’T LEARN HOW TO CODE!
The statement sounds quite awry. Coding to a computer science engineer is what legal courtroom battle is for a lawyer. The nemesis of code has been declared many a times, but coding continued to be the preoccupation of the computer practitioners to this day. The recent giant leaps made by artificial intelligence more in the avatar of LLMs makes the future looks darker for coding a profession. One of the leading lights of the AI revolution Jensen Huang made a recent public pronouncement that kids shouldn’t learn to code, it could better be left to AI.
Now there are lots who have started thinking that way. The nature of work of knowledge workers seems to be witnessing a paradigm shift towards knowledge finally. Tech was presumed to be knowledge to this day and not just a leading and most impact making tool to transform and facilitate horizontal extension of knowledge. At the recent World Government Summit in Dubai, Nvidia Jensen Huang made a counterintuitive break from everyone sitting on tech forums advising the youngsters to learn now to code. He contented that though we are at a very nascent state of the AI revolution, he was sure of the fact that programming is no longer a vital skill.
Coding being an expertise game and that too of a high end type being taken care of by AI, “humans can instead focus on more valuable expertise like biology, education, manufacturing or farming,” reasoned the Nvidia head. It is our job now to create computing technology where nobody has to program. And more importantly, the programming language is human, the only ones we use on a day to day basis, something we are fully conversant in. “Everybody in the world is now a programmer. His is a miracle of artificial intelligence.”
Experts in high end knowledge domains might have needed to learn computer programming for more productive pursuits, could save the time for more productive pursuits. While the only language they need to know is the language they were born in and raised to speak yet they would need to know how and when to apply AI programming. This being the case, he says, “it is vital that we upskill everyone and the upskilling process I believe will be delightful, surprising.” However only time will tell what would be the actual impacts of the wave of AI applications.
CODE OR NOT TO CODE IS NOT THE QUESTION BUT THE HUMAN WRITTEN CODE IS REQUIRED OR NOT IS THE BILLION DOLLAR QUESTION.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.