The technology is all around us, and it is only becoming more prevalent and more integral in our experience of the world.
Only a few years ago, it would have been completely unimaginable to speak to your home speaker and to have it respond in any meaningful way, yet today we have a number of smart home speakers which are fully integrated with the internet and can do a surprising number of things for us.
All of that advancement is thanks to the hard work of coders and programmers all over the world. Coders seem to be the stars of the business world today and are integral to the functioning of just about every company in the world.
However, is this trend going to last, or is it doomed to become obsolete or marginalized, just like any other dominant profession in the past? We asked coding experts at LEARN Academy to shed some light on the matter.
Why Are Coders in Demand?
As the world becomes more connected and integrated, there is a need for the builders and architects of these informational bridges and roads.
That is exactly the job of a coder. Every website you have visited, every purchase you have made online, every chat you’ve had was the result of the work of coders.
As the online ecosystem is expanding and new technologies are being discovered and created, there is a growing need for even more coders and even more people who will build these future worlds. That’s why there are bootcamps for coders which help people learn how to code in a short time so that they can enter the workforce as soon as possible.
What Could Change?
The supremacy of coders seems to be here to stay, then, right? Well, if things stay the way they are, probably yes. We will always need people to build and maintain the vast online worlds we have created.
However, things don’t always stay the same. If something changes drastically, the need for coders might stagnate, dwindle, or even cease altogether.
It is, however, hard to imagine this future. The first thing which comes to mind is the end of technology era, whether through some kind of war or natural catastrophes, but in that case, having too many out-of-work coders will be the least of our worries.
The Rise of AI
The other alternative which is often discussed in terms of the obsolescence of human workers is, of course, robots.
In the case of coders, a special kind of robots – artificial intelligence or AI for short is often mentioned.
You may have heard of some examples of AI beating humans, like the famous Deep Blue beating the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess. And that was in 1997, over 20 years ago.
Since then, AI has advanced a great deal, but it is still considered to be in its infancy.
Can AI Write Code?
There have been several attempts in the recent past to teach the AI to write code. Scientists at Stanford University fed their AI with the entirety of Linux repository and left it to write code overnight.
The code it produced seemed good on the surface level, it followed the basic principle of coding, but it had plenty of mistakes as well.
Is AI Replacing Coders?
Even if the AI does learn to write useful code, that doesn’t mean that the human factor will be obsolete.
What’s more, most coders should welcome and embrace this new tech.
Not having to drudge over some menial task of writing blocks and blocks of code can free up a lot more time for creative thinking and building even more complex works of programming.
