“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?
“就一個詞……塑料。”在1967年的電影《畢業生》(The Graduate)中，由達斯廷?霍夫曼(Dustin Hoffman)飾演的本杰明?布拉多克(Benjamin Braddock)聽到父母的朋友麥圭爾(McGuire)給出的這個職業建議時一臉茫然。換作現在，麥奎爾很可能會建議本杰明做程序員，認為這是一份高薪又穩定的職業。至少在科技行業過去12個月的20萬人大裁員、以及圍繞人工智能(AI)平臺ChatGPT（基于生成式預訓練轉換器的語言模型）的喧囂讓人們意識到機器人也可以寫代碼之前，他會這樣建議。電腦似乎很快就能自己給自己編程了。那么，我們一直以來告訴孩子們的說法——程序員是份靠譜工作——是不是完全錯了？