“If we convinced all the young college graduates to not be software engineers, and it turns out the United States needs more software engineers than ever, that’s hurtful,” Huang explained. “So we have to be mindful of how we communicate the importance of this technology and what it’s able to do.”
That’s as the advent of AI agents has made coding accessible to a broader range of users while also allowing engineers to write much more code. Investors have sold shares of software companies, fearing enterprise customers will use AI to create their own platforms.
Although it’s important to advocate for guard rails on AI, he added that scaring people into believing that the technology will pose an existential threat to humanity, destroy democracy or eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs is “ridiculous.”
“They’re made by people who are like me, CEOs, and somehow because they became CEOs you adopt a God complex, and before you know it you know everything,” Huang said. “And so I think we have to be careful and really ground ourselves to talking about the facts.”
In reality, he estimated that AI has created more than half a million jobs in the last few years. That’s because when companies incorporate AI, they grow faster and hire more people.
And data from hiring site Indeed shows that demand for software engineers is actually increasing. Huang said this demonstrates the difference between a job’s task and its purpose, which often get conflated by AI doomsayers.
In software engineering, for example, the task is coding, but the purpose is innovation, problem-solving, connecting disparate ideas, and identifying new needs.
Another flaw in AI apocalypse arguments is that it assumes demand for coding is somehow fixed at 1 billion lines of code a day, according to Huang.
“We need a trillion lines of code written,” he said. “We need way more code written than that because we have the imagination of solving problems whether it’s in healthcare or science or in manufacturing and retail.”
The difference is that humans don’t have to sit at a keyboard anymore to write code and can instead use AI to do it.
When the cost of professional work falls as AI makes tasks more efficient, the market for those tasks will actually expand. The total number of firms and workers in those fields—from law to accounting to consulting—will grow.
