“Just one word . . . plastics” is the career advice offered by the family friend Mr McGuire to a bemused Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the 1967 movie The Graduate. A modern-day Mr McGuire might well advocate coding as the route to decently paid job security. Or he might have done before the tech industry axed 200,000 jobs in the past 12 months — and the clamour around the artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT raised awareness that machines can write code, too. Computers, it seems, may soon be programming themselves. So is what we’ve been telling our kids about safe jobs all wrong?
“就一个词……塑料。”在1967年的电影《毕业生》(The Graduate)中，由达斯廷•霍夫曼(Dustin Hoffman)饰演的本杰明•布拉多克(Benjamin Braddock)听到父母的朋友麦圭尔(McGuire)给出的这个职业建议时一脸茫然。换作现在，麦奎尔很可能会建议本杰明做程序员，认为这是一份高薪又稳定的职业。至少在科技行业过去12个月的20万人大裁员、以及围绕人工智能(AI)平台ChatGPT（基于生成式预训练转换器的语言模型）的喧嚣让人们意识到机器人也可以写代码之前，他会这样建议。电脑似乎很快就能自己给自己编程了。那么，我们一直以来告诉孩子们的说法——程序员是份靠谱工作——是不是完全错了？