In an article in the Economic Times that was reposted on MSN, Bill Gates is quoted as saying that AI can’t replace programming, and never will. The only problem is that there is no evidence Bill ever said such a thing.
I, and the ZDNET editorial team, tried to source that quote. In doing so, we went down a series of rabbit holes, finding site after site cross-quoting other sites with the same basic message. We finally found one reference to a French podcast that Gates might have been on as a guest, although we were never able to find the podcast itself.
Because The Economic Times and MSN are both outlets with some credibility, all the other sites appear to have taken their Bill Gates quotes at face value. Yet the articles from these two outlets also mix in quotes from “elcabildo,” which appears to be some sort of news aggregator. Unfortunately, it’s not entirely clear which insights MSN is getting from Gates, and which are coming from elcabildo.
I’m giving you this back story to demonstrate how much of an echo chamber the internet can be. This is obviously not news, but before we attribute a statement to someone, it would be nice to know what they actually said.
What Gates actually said, quoted directly from this months-old interview on CNN, is this: “Is AI just helping humans get this done, or is it eventually replacing humans? You know, like people talk about writing code? Simple coding tasks, AI today can replace human work. The most complex coding tasks it’s not able to do yet. And people in the field disagree. Is that within the next year or two or is it more like 10 years away?”
Where Gates’ statements leave a gap is between “simple coding tasks” and “the most complex coding tasks.” I think we’re at the point where AI coding goes well beyond simple tasks, but desperately needs human guidance, and perhaps only one human for tasks that used to take teams. Let’s deconstruct that statement based on my recent experience using OpenAI’s Codex coding agent to do four years of programming in four days.
There’s some nuance to my reporting as well. I described the work as four years of programming because I have historically only had time to push out one new software product a year. So the fact that I created four products in four days gave us that year metric.
But let’s tighten up that claim a bit. If I had to contract out that work to an experienced developer, each product would have probably taken about three months to build.
That’s assuming I already knew the developer and had previously vetted the coder’s skill to the point that I knew I would get quality results from my specifications. When hiring a coder (or almost anyone), that is not an assumption one can casually make. History is filled with sad stories of customers contracting with contractors (whether they’re roofers or programmers, it doesn’t matter) who have had bad experiences.
In fact, way back in the day, I made a good chunk of my living doing project turnarounds. My shtick was going into companies that had contracted with developers, and whose projects went horribly wrong. My job was to bring in a team to rescue the project, often save the customer’s job, and try to stay within a budget so that the company’s board didn’t do wholesale replacement of the management team.
In other words, human-only programming projects aren’t perfect, either. They, too, need strong human management.
In the CNN interview, Gates was asked about the Satya Nadella statement that 30% of Microsoft’s code is now being done by AI. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria then commented, “That seems inevitably to mean you’ll hire fewer coders.” He then asked Gates about the challenging job environment, but Bill didn’t answer directly.
Instead, he talked about the benefits of increased productivity, saying, among other things, that one could be to “free up people” to “have longer vacations.” Here’s where it’s possible to take the billionaire out of context and claim he’s out of touch, suggesting that job loss is very much like a super-long vacation. But what he did say is that added productivity could have a variety of benefits, including a smaller class size and helping people get more done. The key point he made was, “The question is, is it coming so fast that you don’t have time to adjust to it?”
Even though Gates didn’t say so directly, programming jobs are threatened by AI. Some simple math will demonstrate this fact very clearly.
Let’s get back to my AI coding experience. Let’s assume I brought in known developers, and that each was given one of the four add-ons I wanted coded. It’s possible they would have successfully delivered all four products within three months, but it’s not really likely. In practice, one or more projects would have slipped. They always do.
Source – https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-bill-gates-really-said-about-ai-replacing-coding-jobs/