As AI advances in all industries, Google’s Head of Research suggests coding is still a crucial discipline, and AI is a long way from eliminating developers. However, Matias says that due to advancements in AI, these tools are still useful for helping with coding, where the actual principles of coding are still relevant despite existing advancements and changing technologies.
In a Business Insider interview with Matias during his visit to Google’s New York office, he noted that learning to code is a necessity now.
There is one important idea that has stayed with the reader, this is where learning the basic disciplines is concerned. “Everyone should code”, Matias said.
AI Is Not Taking Over On Everything
His remark is made at a time when software engineers and students are increasingly concerned about the effects that AI will have on conventional coding jobs.
Humans are also asked to write numerous codes every day, Auto-generated coders such as the GitHub Copilot also make coding-related employment forecasts that coding jobs will soon be redundant. According to some opinions such AI tools can save as much as 70% of time code is being written. Even so, there is still some high degree of confidence by Matias that the AI is not a threat to the human coders.
Google Research head
AI technologies such as GitHub Copilot, which assist developers by generating code, have led to predictions that coding jobs may soon be obsolete. Some experts claim that these AI tools can reduce the time spent coding by as much as 70 percent. However, Matias remains confident that AI is not a replacement for human coders.
‘AI can help with some activities to some extent, especially with junior employees, but it is not coding all-around,’ he said. He also said that although with the help of artificial intelligence it is now possible to generate code, it still needs to be reviewed or validated by a human.
Matias agreed with the recent trends in the tech industry have posed some issues with emphasis on the junior developers as they may find it difficult to log practical experience. He was quick to point out that, despite the benefits of the AI tools, students still cannot gain the practical experience needed through coding on the virtual platform.
For nurturing junior talent at Google, the firm has been donating its resources towards fostering the gap between novel computer science students and working practice.
For Matias of Google, coding is essential for industries other than software. Coding he went on to say, is as fundamental as math to the modern society or as math to modern life.
He underscored that basic coding knowledge should be considered essential, at least for people who do not intend to become developers.
According to Business Insider, Google’s top executive Yossi Matias said something like: “I think that the basic notion of learning the basic disciplines remains as important as ever.”
Matias’ remarks may sound absurd at a time when almost all organizations are aspiring to utilize generative AI to generate code. This change has raised fears of unemployment among software engineers and reportedly has discouraged college students from undertaking conventional computer science studies.
International research firm Gartner, in a note out recently, has pointed out that more than 80% software developers have to adopt new skills including natural language prompts and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to be employable as generative AI takes over.
Sundar Pichai, Google, in the firm’s Q3 2024 earnings video, stated that “at Google, more new code is written by AI than by human engineers, with the AI creations then approved by engineers.”
Making a comment regarding the impact of AI on the characteristic of work, the Google vice-president had this to say to the news outlet that while AI is intended to assist with junior-level tasks that ‘may or may not have some impact’.
He also explained how AI has the potential to begin reinventing nearly every profession, at least biology, chemistry, medicine.
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