More and more tech leaders are predicting the takeover in software engineering and programming by AI systems.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made a bold prediction about the future of programming, claiming that AI will replace the vast majority of human programmers within a year. He went on to outline a rapid progression towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) and even superintelligence (ASI), painting a picture of a world drastically reshaped by increasingly autonomous and powerful AI systems. His remarks, delivered with an air of inevitability, touch upon themes of recursive self-improvement, the exponential growth of AI capabilities, and the potential societal implications of this technological leap.
“We believe as an industry that in the next one year the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers,” Schmidt said. “We also believe that within one year you will have (AI) graduate-level mathematicians that are at the top of graduate math programs.”
He continued, laying out his reasoning: “What happens in two years? Well, I’ve just told you about programming, and I told you about math. Programming plus math are the basis of sort of our whole digital world. So the evidence and the claims from the research groups in OpenAI and Anthropic and so forth is that there now, somewhere around 10 or 20% of the code that they’re developing in their research programs is being generated by the computer. That’s called recursive self-improvement, is the technical term.”
Schmidt then projected further into the future: “So what happens when this thing starts to scale? Well, a lot. One way to say this is that within three to five years we’ll have what is called general intelligence, AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician, physicist, you know, artist, writer, thinker, politician.” he said.
He described the implications: “What happens when every single one of us has the equivalent of the smartest human on every problem in our pocket? I want to make the point here is that in the next year or two, this foundation is being locked in and we’re not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that because, remember, the computers are now doing self-improvement, they’re learning how to plan, and they don’t have to listen to us anymore. We call that super intelligence, or ASI, artificial superintelligence, and this is the theory that there will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans..this occurs within six years just based on scale.”
Finally, he concluded with a cautionary note: “This path is not understood in our society. There’s no language for what happens with the arrival of this. That’s why it’s underhyped. People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level which is largely free.”
Schmidt isn’t the first person to talk about how AI will quickly replace human programmers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes that 90 percent of code will be written by AI in 6 months, and a 100 percent is possible within a year. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has said that 95 percent of code will be written by AI in the next five years.
But Eric Schmidt has extrapolated these trends. With computers soon getting better than most humans at maths and science, they likely will keep improving their abilities without too much human intervention. This could mean that AI will rapidly become extremely smart — much smarter than the smartest human. And there’s no telling where this will lead — human beings owe their position on this planet largely because of their intelligence, and when we create a new digital species that’s much smarter than we are, it might lead to some unexpected consequences.