Over the last few years, all manner of experts and tech-watchers have been urging kids to code, but the founder of the hottest tech company at the moment thinks things might just be the reverse.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has said that there’s no reason for kids to learn to code. “I want to say something and it’s going to sound completely opposite of what people feel,” he said at an event. “Over the course of the last 10-15 years, almost everybody who sits on the stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program. But in fact it’s almost exactly the opposite,” he said.
“It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the program language is ‘human’,” Huang said. “Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence. The countries, the people that understand how to solve a domain problem, in say digital biology, or in education of young people, or in manufacturing or in farming, those people who understand domain expertise now can utilize technology that is readily available to them,” he added.
“You now have a computer that will do what you tell it to do. It is vital that we upskill everyone. And the upskilling process will be delightful and surprising,” he continued.
Jensen Huang seemed to be saying that because AI will soon be able to code better than humans, coding as a skill might not remain very valuable. Huang seemed to imply that in the future people would just describe their software requirements to a computer in a language of their choice, say English, and the AI would whip up the piece of software. As such, everyone would be able to create their own bits of software by interacting with AI in a human language of their choice.
This is a sentiment that’s echoed by many in the AI industry. “The hottest new programming language is English,” former OpenAI and Tesla researcher Andrej Karpathy had said. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said that white collar jobs, which would include programming, would be most impacted by AI. And NVIDIA’s CEO says that kids of today might not need to learn to code at all, hinting that AI which can code would become commonplace in the next decade or so. It remains to be seen how these predictions play out, but learning how to code might no longer be the rock solid advice it was for much of the last couple of decades.