Should our children learn to program?

According to Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA there is no need for our children to learn programming:

"Everybody in the world is now a programer. This is the miracle. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence. [...] It closes the gap between technology and society. [...] The technology divide has been closed."

The YouTuber "Goda Go" summarized a talk by Huang at the World Government Summit 2024 where he states that programming skills won't be important any more in the future. He says that it is their job (the job of companies associated to artificial intelligence) to handle what programmers are doing today and make the human language the new programming language. With artificial intelligence people are now able to get computers to do what they intend (5:16). 

In his opinion it is best for people in general to know how to solve domain problems, e.g. problems in biology, which was an impactful, life science according to Huang. In essence, for children it was important to learn how to solve problems rather than programming.

Own Opinion

I think in the long run Huang is partially right. For the most people programming will be served as a service in order to make them able to get the computers to do what they intend. People will be able to focus on a specific problem and prompt the computers to get the problems solved.

However, I think there are programmers needed to maintain these systems. I don't think that computers will actively provide and maintain these services by them selves, but I might be proven wrong in the future.

Especially I think that in the short and middle term it will take some time to make these systems available in such a form that people will actually use them to solve domain problems. Also we programmers shouldn't loose track of how programs are created and should always be able to intervene and take control of the software development process.

For our children: Learning how to program might still be an option if the domain artificial intelligence is in their interest. I think it might also still be an important side or middle step skill to understand how artificial systems work and how AI systems provide them computer programs in order to solve their problems. But I agree that it would be better to have children focusing on skills how to make the world a better place and use artificial intelligence to achieve that, without the hurdle of speaking a machine language.

Sources:

Goda Go: (2024, March 4). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEd-LqBCONg