AI is among the “next” technologies that developers believe will have a positive world impact.
Some artists, developers, writers, and other creators have expressed concern that generative AIs may pose a threat to their livelihoods. However, an increasing number view such AIs as assistive tools that will help creators rather than replace them.
Stack Overflow surveyed its developer community to find out how developers feel about technologies currently making the headlines.
“Our latest pulse survey asked developers to think about nascent trends in technology and tell us how they felt about them,” explained Erin Yepis Senior Analyst, Market Research and Insights at Stack Overflow.
“With AI-assisted technologies in the news, this survey’s aim was to get a baseline for perceived utility and impact of a range of buzzworthy technologies in order to better understand the overall ecosystem.”
The technologies were ranked on a scale of zero (negative impact) to 10 (positive impact) based on expected world impact.
“Possibly what we are seeing here as far as why developers would not rate AI more negatively than technologies like low code/no code or blockchain but do give it a higher emergent score is that they understand the technology better than a typical journalist or think tank analyst,” reflects Yepis.
“Developers understand the distinction between media buzz around AI replacing humans in well-paying jobs and the possibility of humans in better quality jobs when AI and machine learning technologies mature.”
Machine learning (18%) and AI-assisted technologies (13%) came out on top of the technologies that developers want more hands-on training with. Despite ranking just about over the mean in expected world impact, blockchain (9%) took third place. Cloud computing (8%) and open-source (5%) took the fourth and fifth top spots, respectively.
