“PRETTY UNSETTLING”
The debate remains heated. Two years ago, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang declared that the ultimate goal was to make it so “nobody has to programme” or code.
“We will look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given,” Andrew Ng, founder of training platform DeepLearning.AI, shot back on Tuesday.
In his view, coding is not an obsolete skill – AI has simply made it available to more people.
Another argument has taken hold in Silicon Valley: interpersonal skills will become more valuable than ever, with some voices going so far as to tout a humanities education as sound tech career preparation.
“As AI can do more of a job, the things that will distinguish and differentiate a given employee are going to be the human skills – critical thinking, communication, teamwork,” said Greg Hart, chief executive of training platform Coursera, which has seen enrollment in its critical thinking courses triple over the past year.
Florian Douetteau, chief executive of Dataiku, a French company specialising in enterprise AI, agreed.
The real human added value, he told AFP, is the “capacity for judgment”.
He described a world in which an AI agent works through the night, its human counterpart reviews the results in the morning, and then the agent resumes working autonomously during the lunch break.
But the entrepreneur nevertheless expressed unease.
“We are going to have a generation of people who will never have written anything from start to finish in their entire lives,” he said. “That’s pretty unsettling.”