@realBigBrainAI
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, on why top programmers won't be replaced by AI, they'll be amplified by it: He starts with an observation about the existing hierarchy in software: "The very top programmers were worth 10 times more than the ones right below. There's something special about the mathematical reasoning skills of programmers." Rather than flattening that gap, he argues AI will widen it: "Those people will become more valuable, not less valuable, because these systems need to be controlled by humans at the moment. Those people will be capable of grasping the parallelization and the activities of this." To show what this amplification actually looks like in practice, Eric shares a story from a startup he's involved with. He was talking to one of the programmers there, who works on UIs, about his daily workflow: "He said, 'I write the spec of what I want and then I write a test function, an evaluation function. And then I turn it on.' I said, 'What time?' And he goes, '7:00 in the evening.' And I go, 'Okay. What do you then do?' Well, he has dinner with his wife and he goes to sleep." Eric continues: "I said, 'Do you wake up?' Said, 'No, I sleep very well.' 'When does it finish?' 'Oh, 4:00 in the morning.' And then he gets up, has breakfast, you know, does whatever he does, and then he sees what's been good." @ericschmidt calls the whole thing "mindboggling." The story captures what amplification really means. The programmer isn't writing less code. He's producing a night's worth of work while asleep, because the machine is running on his spec, his tests, his judgment of what "good" looks like. The leverage belongs to those who can define the problem precisely, write the tests that matter, and recognize good output when they see it.