AI Could Make Human Coders Obsolete Within Two Years, AWS Chief Predicts

Amazon exec gives dire warning about tech jobs in leaked audio

Amazon (AMZN) Web Services CEO Matt Garman has just revealed a startling prediction about the future of a popular career. During an internal meeting, which Business Insider obtained leaked audio of, Garman told software developers at Amazon Web Services that artificial intelligence could take over a significant portion of their jobs in roughly two years. Related: Dell makes a harsh move, solidifying fears about the future of work "If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time - I can't exactly predict where it is - it's possible that most developers are not coding," said Garman during the meeting. He claimed that because of AI, software developers will most likely have to "innovate" and update their skill set since being a developer in 2025 "may be different" than what it was in 2020. "It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we're going to try to go build, because that's going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code," said Garman. Coding, which is a part of software engineering, is a job that involves teaching computers how to complete tasks through programming language, and it can pay up to six figures a year, according to estimates from Indeed. Garman isn't the first executive at a major company to reveal the threat that AI can have on the future of software engineering. During the World Government Summit in February this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called AI a "miracle" for computer programming. "Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science, everybody should learn how to program," said Huang during the summit. "In fact, it's almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program." More Labor: As AI is rapidly evolving, many companies across different industries are planning to replace jobs with the technology in an effort to cut costs. According to a recent report for Goldman Sachs, it is estimated that AI could replace about 300 million full-time jobs in the U.S. and Europe by 2030. Many employees across the country are growing concerned about job stability amid the boom of AI. According to a recent survey from CNBC and SurveyMonkey, 42% of U.S. workers are concerned about the impact AI will have on their jobs. The survey also notes that "workers of color, individual contributors, and lower-salaried workers" were most concerned about the threat AI poses on their employment. Related: Veteran fund manager sees world of pain coming for stocks

AI Could Make Coders Obsolete in Two Years, AWS Chief Predicts - Decrypt

Developers, your days of typing out lines of code may be numbered. At least that's what Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, thinks. In a leaked recording from an internal fireside chat, Garman dropped a bombshell: within around 24 months, most developers won't be coding anymore. "If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time -- I can't exactly predict where it is -- it's possible that most developers are not coding," Garman said, according to a Business Insider report. And it's not just Garman who believes this is the future that humanity is building. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI will make "everyone a programmer," without the need to know a single thing about coding, while Microsoft's Satya Nadella predicted that AI will create a billion new developers by leveraging the exact same premise. And just last year, Emad Mostaque, former CEO of Stability AI, predicted that "there will be no programmers in five years." He envisioned a future where AI models run locally on smartphones, eliminating the need for internet connectivity -- a vision that turned into a reality sooner than expected, with Google Pixel running Gemini mini locally and iPhones being capable of running open source LLMs and even generative image models through apps like Draw Things. But not everyone's buying into this AI utopia -- or dystopia, depending on your job. Garman's predecessor, Adam Selipsky, said some AI companies are "massively overhyped," drawing parallels to the dot-com bubble and warning that while AI itself might be transformative, its impact might be overvalued by Wall Street. The way AWS's Garman sees it, it's not about entirely eliminating developers but rather redefining their role. "Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers," he explained. "It's not necessarily the skill in and of itself. The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that's interesting for my end users to use?" In other words, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy's predictions of English becoming the hottest programming language in the tech space may be true -- and even this is questionable, considering how good LLMs are at translating text. According to Business Insider, the AWS chief also introduced the concept of "undifferentiated heavy lifting" for developers, where they work across all aspects of software development. Coders could offload the grunt work to AI, Garman said, while concentrating their own brainpower on specialized problems. But what about the economic impact of a society in which machines take over people's roles? While some fear that hundreds of millions of jobs will be lost to AI across the entire labor spectrum in the near future, others see the potential for massive growth. AI is predicted to add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy, and society as a whole will need to adapt. And that will come at some cost: A recent IBM report argues that in the next three years, at least 40% of the world's working population will require re-skilling training due to the massive adoption of AI technologies. The question, of course, is whether AI, as it continues to get exponentially smarter, will be able to do the highly creative work as well as the mundane stuff. Given that nearly 70% of business owners would prefer to let robots deal with decision-making tasks, we're definitely in a beware-of-what-you-wish-for situation.