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In his January interview to the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will replace mid-level software engineers as early as 2025.
At one point in the interview, Joe Rogan said what’s been on everyone’s mind since OpenAI first released ChatGPT: AI will make all of us obsolete.
“The general fear that we’re going to become obsolete is that human beings are essentially creating a superior version of higher intelligence that will be powered by quantum computing and connected to nuclear reactors,” Rogan said. “They’ve already shown that AI has learned to code.”
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Zuckerberg, whose business empire was built on his ability to code and design the website we know as Facebook, immediately lit up with enthusiasm.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “I think this year, probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.”
Then he added: “Over time, we’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.”
But this shift, in his view, will also free people to do a lot of “crazy things.” Just as past technological revolutions automated survival-based labor, the AI revolution will free humanity to pursue more creative, artistic, and cultural endeavors.
The integration of artificial intelligence into daily life will also reduce the working hours. “I think the number of hours in a week that someone will have to work in order to be able to get by will probably continue to shrink,” Zuckerberg said.
At the same time, he believes that people who are super engaged in what they do are going to be able to work really hard and accomplish way more than they ever could, because they will have unimaginable leverage from having “a lot more technology.”
But in order for that to happen, Zuckerberg notes, it’s important that AI remains open-source to avoid corporate or government monopoly.
Addressing the fears of human obsolescence, Meta’s CEO makes a key distinction between an “intelligence,” human “will,” and “consciousness.” He notes that current AI models can deploy massive intelligence to solve a problem and then “shut itself down.” This suggests that while AI can master coding, it lacks the inherent drive that characterizes human innovation.
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