Transcript
Capital One Announcer (0:00)
Brought to you by the Capital One Savor Card. With Savor, you earn unlimited 3% cash back on dining, entertainment and at grocery stores. That's unlimited cash back on ordering takeout from home or unlimited cash back on tickets to concerts and games. So grab a bite, grab a seat and earn unlimited 3% cash back with the saver card. Capital One what's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com for details.
Natalie Kitroeff (0:26)
From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroweff. This is the Daily. For the past few years, people all over the world have been asking how AI will change their lives or affect their work. And the answers range from total salvation to absolute doom. At the front lines of all of this are software developers who are using artificial intelligence so much that it's already taking over many of their day to day tasks. Today I talked to Times magazine writer Clive Thompson about his recent survey of the tech industry to find out what it looks like when people invite AI to do their jobs. It's Tuesday, april 14th. Clive Thompson, legendary tech reporter, person whose work I have admired for a very long time. Welcome to the Daily.
Clive Thompson (1:39)
It's good to be here.
Natalie Kitroeff (1:40)
So you are here because you've been covering extensively the question of how much AI is affecting the workers who are really the backbone of Silicon Valley programmers, the people who write the code that powers every piece of software we use. This is a group of people, you know. Well, not least of all because you wrote a book about them, you spent a lot of time talking to them in recent months. So what did you find? Walk us through that. Reporting what it entailed and what it unearthed.
Clive Thompson (2:13)
Sure. Well, I'd been following the arrival or the advent of, of AI as a tool that can write code for a couple of years now. But it started to accelerate a lot last year and I really just wanted to find out, you know, what was going on in the everyday trenches of software development. So I just hit the road and I talked to about 75 different software developers all around the country. Yeah, 75. Yeah.
Natalie Kitroeff (2:38)
That's a lot.
Clive Thompson (2:39)
That's a lot of them. Yeah. I might have overdone it, but I really wanted to know what was going on kind of across the board because different software developers have very different types of jobs. Right. So I wanted to talk to people who are doing consulting work for regional banks in Tennessee, people who are doing buzzy little startups, just the two of them in Silicon Valley trying to like make something new. And then, you know, the people that are working at the big software giants like Google and Amazon and Microsoft, where you've got, you know, tens of thousands of developers having to take care of these code bases that have been around for 20 years. Right.
