Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Source: Nvidia
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang predicts the end of coding – he believes that children don’t need to learn to code because in the future, artificial intelligence will do it. Addressing the World Government Summit in Dubai, Huang pointed out that programming is no longer a vital skill at the current stage of AI development. “Instead, people should focus on becoming experts in fields such as biology, education, manufacturing or agriculture”, added the Nvidia CEO.
Over the last 15 years, virtually every technology forum has heard the message that it is vital for young people to learn coding skills. “In fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite,” said the technology expert. Our job is to create computer technology so that no one has to program anymore. “Everyone in the world is a programmer. It’s a miracle of artificial intelligence,” says Huang.
He points out that people do not need to spend time learning programming languages. The only language they need to learn is their mother tongue, in which they have been experts since birth. However, people will still need to know when and how to use AI programming. Huang concluded his speech by stressing that “it is very important for everyone to improve their overall skills, and the process of improving skills will be enjoyable and surprising”.
Thanks to advances in generative AI, natural language processing promises to be the future of programming. It will eliminate the need for young professionals to spend hundreds of hours learning specific programming languages. The Nvidia CEO envisages that programming will be possible simply by entering a request in free text in the native language. Current AI models both give different answers to identical text requests and also tend to lie when they do not have accurate information. But it is probably only a matter of time before these problems are solved.
This is not the first time Mr Huang has predicted the end of programming. However, not all technology experts agree with him. Technology analyst Patrick Moorhead told his followers on the X platform that he has heard for 30 years that “this or that will kill coding”, yet we still have a shortage of programmers. He listed several programming languages and tools that were supposed to “kill programming”, but didn’t. Moorhead draws parallels with the desktoppublishing revolution. Computer graphics didn’t kill creativity, but gave it additional possibilities – you don’t have to work with scissors, glue and paper to design.
Nvidia’s CEO is worth listening to because Nvidia’s share price has recently risen dramatically and the company has become the third most valuable US company behind Microsoft and Apple, ahead of tech giants like Alphabet (Google) and Amazon.
Overall, I can only agree with the Nvidia CEO that children should not over-emphasise the importance of coding, but instead be “up to speed” with technology itself. Young people would benefit from learning more about virtual and augmented reality, as well as design, production and audio processing. In this way, they would learn how to create and upload a real working computer game to a software store (e.g. Meta Oculus store). Of course, you don’t need some programming skills, but that would be very different from a C++ or Python course.
Only time will tell whether AI will really threaten the programming profession. Current data show that since the arrival of ChatGPT, the professions most affected have been those related to copywriting and translation. Meanwhile, the number of people employed in software development increased by 6%.
If you have an opinion on whether children should learn to code, write it in the comments section of this article.
For reference. 1993. NVIDIA Corporation, founded in 2010, is a leading US technology company specialising in the design and manufacture of graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming, business and data centres. The company is also involved in artificial intelligence and deep learning, developing solutions that accelerate AI algorithms.