At the World Government Summit event, Jensen Huang made a statement that is sure to generate discord. Nvidia's CEO stated that children no longer need to learn to program, because Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do it for them.
In effect, the executive said that we should encourage children to develop other valuable skills such as biology or education. When it comes to code development, AI will do that work for humans.
These statements contradict what we have seen over the past 10 or 15 years from men like him saying. As he himself says, many of those who occupy a position similar to his have advised children to learn to program as soon as possible.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, argues that we should stop saying kids should learn to code. He argues the rise of AI means we can replace programming languages with human language prompts thus enabling everyone to be a programmer. AI will kill coding.pic.twitter.com/SxK9twhEby
— Dare Obasanjo🐀 (@Carnage4Life) February 24, 2024
Now, however, with the advent of AI, this skill is no longer so essential. For the CEO of Nvidia, technological evolution has created tools for humans to stop worrying about developing code.
“It's our job to create a computing technology so that no one needs to program. And that programming language is human. Everyone in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of Artificial Intelligence.”
This is an excerpt of what Jeseng Huang says in the video you can see above and which summarizes his position on this topic. For him, AI is everything we need to develop computer programs.
Children should focus on other areas such as biology, education or agriculture
The executive also surprises by stating that today's children should focus on learning other areas. He lists biology, education, manufacturing, agriculture and others as the most productive activities.
Still, it will be necessary to provide people with knowledge so they know when they should apply the programming developed by AI. In this sense, Huang concludes by saying that “it is vital that we improve everyone's skills, and I believe that the process of improving skills will be enchanting and surprising.”
Despite what the Nvidia executive says, the last few months have shown us that AI is not yet ready to take on this role. Several studies demonstrate that AI still makes mistakes in code development, mistakes that professional programmers consider to be beginner's mistakes.
Analysts also point out that in the last 30 years we have heard that tool X or Y would end coding. However, there is currently a great demand for programmers.
In other words, Jensen Huang may even be right in his predictions, however, it is still too early to take him for granted. Although several Artificial Intelligence tools already exhibit programming capabilities, they are still poorly trained in this field to be able to replace the human programmer in this task.