The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has also given rise to a pressing question, “are we at the risk of losing our jobs to robots?” Especially those who work in the tech sector such as software engineers.

As technology learns to adapt to prompts and deliver sound responses, do day-to-day tasks and turn into a faster and non-tiring version of the human brain, some worry whether it’ll soon replace the creator itself.

The CEO of one of the top tech companies in the world, Google, answered this query of people in a podcast with the New York Times. Sundar Pichai sat down with Casey Newton and Kevin Roose to talk about AI, ChatGPT and Bard among other things.

Given the fact that Google itself has thousands of software engineers working at their different headquarters, the company’s CEO, Pichai, was asked how concerned the staff at the workplace is about AI rising at this speed.

To which the 50-year-old Indian-American business executive said he feels that with any technology, one has to adapt. “I think this one, there’ll be a lot of societal adaptation. And as part of that, we all may need to course-correct in certain areas,” Pichai said.

Now coming to software engineers, Pichai laid out two things that can turn out to be true as AI rises. “To your specific question, I think for software engineers, there are two things that will also be true. One is some of the grunt work you’re doing as part of programming is going to get better. So maybe it’ll be more fun to program over time — no different from the Google Docs make it easier to write. And so if you’re a programmer, over time, having these collaborative IDs with the assistance built in, I think, is going to make it easier,” the Google CEO added. But it’s not all bad news or clouds of worry. Pichai believes that programming will soon become more accessible to many people.

“The other thing that excites me is that programming is going to become more accessible to more people. And so it’s such an important role in the world. You’re creating things. And today, the bar is very high,” he said.

But what about the danger of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could become superhuman and become dangerous for mankind? In the past, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman has spoken about the possibility of AGI that could have a dramatic effect and cause bad change in the world.

However, Pichai has his eyes set on the benefits of AGI.

“It is so clear to me that these systems are going to be very, very capable. And so it almost doesn’t matter whether you’ve reached AGI or not. You’re going to have systems which are capable of delivering benefits at a scale we have never seen before and potentially causing real harm,” he said during the podcast.

“So can we have an AI system which can cost disinformation at scale? Yes. Is it AGI? It really doesn’t matter. Why do we need to worry about AI safety? Because you have to anticipate this and evolve to meet that moment. And so today, we do a lot of things with AI people have taken it for granted,” he added.