Zuckerberg says ai will replacing all coding skills soon

Hi,

Zuckerberg and the CEO of NVIDIA say that coding really is dead. Which is a shame because I’m finally getting the hang of it.

I also do wonder if AI will be a tool for us to use or be used by companies to produce moulds that take care of all our needs.

I’ve read ‘don’t invent the wheel’ there are libraries out there. This is true but I do feel you have to invent that wheel, just once. To find out what a wheel is. It’s actually quite complicated with an axis and bearings. When you really understand that, you can make real use of a good library and choose the one that is compatible with your needs.

Will the same be true for AI? Will it be easy to use or will it take programming skills?

Right now I see a lot of supposed AI that is just programming being sold as AI. On Freepik for example, a website that offers foto’s and pictures. You can remove a picture’s background and you’re immediately moved to the AI section of the site. AI also produces really ugly pictures. At least for now it takes someone who can actually draw to make good use of it.

I also watched this post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K-AXiAG9ok and he says coding is not dead. At all. He explains it as fear mongering by people that want to have attention.

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The people who would profit from people believing in AI as a wonder cure are selling it as such? Take that with a grain of salt

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Well, it’s Mr Zuckerberg. It’s hard to shrug off what he says, it’s just as hard to believe it.

The thing is, when I hear that the scientists working on a new telescope or a new vaccine say they’re using AI, that fills me with wonder and awe. I doubt they will be ‘replaced’, they will use it to generate better and faster results.
But these engineers that continuously find new and exciting ways of feeding me an unending stream of advertisements really do get to me.

I guess I needed to talk about this a bit.

Greets,
Karin

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It’s very easy to shrug off what Zuck says. He’s not an actual coding expert

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He did go to Harvard and did computer science, didn’t he? And learned all that stuff? Why wouldn’t he be a coding expert?

Karin

He dropped out. He’s good at being rich and firing people and blaming AI helps make him richer

I’m not dropping out.

It seems to me that AI will most certainly change the way we code. However, it will never (or at least not in the foreseeable future) replace programmers. Sure, I can see many of the monotonous tasks of coding, such as simple debugging, basic layout — building those kind of websites that are just a bunch of library components bundled together in a generic blob of bad code — yes, I can see AI replacing those kind of programmers, who are practically prompt engineers instead of software ones, taking shortcuts, writing code they don’t understand.

I can see AI being a coder’s best friend, guiding, answering questions, helping with debugging, doing those monotonous tasks. However, it can’t be the coder. It lacks the creativity and personalized solutions. And in the end, AI, in all of its seeming brilliance these days, actually relies on human knowledge to do these tasks, from a gigantic database of human knowledge called the internet. As new tasks come, unsolved ones, ones of an entirely new genre, it won’t have this human data to figure out how to solve them. Some advanced systems may have the ability to attempt solutions of their own, but I highly doubt they will ever be able to match human innovation and creativity when it comes to solving new problems. AI is amazing at processing huge amounts of data and using it to accomplish tasks that have already been solved. But new problems? In my opinion, the current model of global AI is incapable of solving them. We’d need a whole new approach to AI, something that hasn’t been invented yet.

So until then, I think of AI as a nice assistant and nothing more, to coders who really understand their code and practice coming up with creative solutions from their own heads to new problems. It’s a great information processing tool. Probably the greatest one invented to date. But the best it can do is statistically shuffle vast amounts of human solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Figuring out how to implement AI into your workflow without reducing the quality of your code may be an excellent skill to attain. But as a beginner, one should learn the fundamentals first, so as not to risk becoming reliant on potentially flawed AI systems.

Just my thoughts!

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Hi,

I used chatGPT a few times. Once, I do some volunteer teaching, I was helping a former pupil of mine with a paper she had to write for her studies as a social worker. It looked really good to me but the professor saw straight through it and correctly pointed out obvious flaws (in retrospect).
Another time I was trying to resolve something on my ubuntu pc (linux). I really don’t know much about ubuntu and after hours of pain I ended up reinstalling.

It led me to believe what you imply, I think. AI is great if you know what you are doing, so that you can filter out the good answers. Because there is a lot of great sounding muck as well. It is also great if you have no clue because it all reads so beautifully, you just don’t notice it is not necessarily all true. But if you know basics, not enough to judge an answer on its value, you are in deep shit. At best, it has inspired me or acted like a really good search engine. The only people that are going to use AI for coding successfully, therefore, are good coders. It will reduce the number of people necessary for the job. So, there is the hope that indeed it will also produce new tasks and initiatives the way windows did in the eighties for which more people are going to be needed.

Greets,
Karin

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Totally agree with you, @mientje. I see evidence of this every time I use AI as well. If you look through the polished grammar, sentence structure and fancy descriptions, you will see a very sophisticated, finely-tuned and highly re-iterated statistical text generator who’s only as mighty as the amount of data it has access to.

Doesn’t sound to me like a replacement to the problem-solving and creativity it takes to be a cutting-edge programmer in the 21st century.

All the best to you and let’s hope we adapt smoothly to this new form of processing information called AI.

Nicolas

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AI is a really great help in science. It improves pattern recognition greatly.

The kind of AI that is being overhyped now is generative AI, to which are attributed greater feats than what is real

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This is very true, thank you @ILM. There are many different kinds of AI.

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Aha, did not realize there’s a difference. That speaks to an underlying gut feeling I’ve been having for a while. Let’s hope that employers of social workers for example realize this before they have been replaced by generative ai.

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100%, it is best “snake oil” in the world.

Please check jobs opening in linkedin and other top, popular job search websites and decide yourself.

Being from India and investor in some of top IT consulting companies; I can surely tell you that for another 4 decades atleast they will keep hiring “human” coders per their quarterly reports ahem :slight_smile:

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I think that once ai is given unrestricted internet access and a will to do stuff without prompting, it will achieve agi quickly, then it will replace humans.

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That is not terribly likely with current AI technology. It’s statistical interpolation, not some actual intelligence

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He did attend Harvard, and he did drop out, but for obvious reasons.

People often point to this fact as if it’s inherently a bad thing or suggest that he can’t code because he didn’t finish his formal education.

This is simply unfounded. While he likely doesn’t spend much time coding, it’s unreasonable to suggest that he’s not a competent coder.

We don’t know if he’s competent or not, and frankly it doesn’t matter. His job now it making as much money for Meta as he can, and selling AI as a wonder cure helps him do that, no matter what the actual capabilities of the technology are.

People have a hard time believing in change and will fight to maintain that belief. We’ve only just scratched the surface of AI and look how powerful it is. To say that AI will not replace a particular job, especially without providing a timeline, is short-sighted.

In the '90s, people said the internet was just a fad. In the early 2000s, they claimed that programming jobs were disappearing. They said this with great conviction. Now, we use the internet in ways we never imagined and rely on it just as much.

So, take what billionaire CEOs and random people in forums say with a grain of salt. AI has already changed so much in such a short time, so to make such a definitive statement that it won’t replace coders is a bit premature and naive.

Its a good thing this discussion was talking about the capabilities of specific current AI technology rather than a blanket statement that any AI will never replace any programmer :person_shrugging:

The current LLM based technology just doesn’t have the sort of reasoning capacity required to fully replace all of the tasks of a software developer. Its a statistical inference engine that’s very good at replicating things that humans would say in natural language but it doesn’t fundamentally have any reasoning capability.