When DeepMind's 'AlphaCode' Competed Against Human Programmers

Among at least a few programmers, this has already provoked some concern. Recently a programming student on Hacker News complained of "AlphaCode Anxiety" (as well as worries about GitHub's Copilot). "Now it feels like I'm running against a clock until the career I am working very hard for will automate itself away," the student wrote. When a blog post at CodeForces declared "The future has arrived," one worried programmer even argued that "there is a limit to what humans should automate." The programmer added pointedly that the DeepMind developers who built AlphaCode "think that they are irreplaceable, but they would be the first ones to get replaced." But the fact that AlphaCode finished in the bottom half was also greeted with a very human disparagement. "AI is such a noob," the first commenter responded.