Natasha Singer

Oh, we have to write something.

Let's get out to Chromebooks.

There was what I would say is kind of a magic beans jobs narrative that the tech industry campaigned on.

Computer science is interesting and important, but it came with this promise of learn to code and you'll be rich and powerful.

You'll be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

You know, it's not just...

that there are new AI tools that can do some human tasks that tech companies are encouraging employees to use.

It's that big companies like Microsoft and Google are shifting their priorities to build more and more of these huge data centers, which they're pouring billions of dollars into and moving teams to focus on AI products.

And so it's also that there's much more spending on AI, which may mean there's going to be less spending on human capital.

And then on top of that, Stanford recently did a study called Canaries in the Coal Mine, looking at the jobs that were most vulnerable to being replaced by AI or reduced by AI.

And the top two were call center workers and software engineers.

Wow.

So somewhere around 2012, we see a kind of increase in prominent tech executives saying,

We have to teach computer science in high schools.

We have to teach kids to learn how to code because these are the jobs of the future.

These are high-paying jobs.

You will, if you major in computer science in college, right out of college, get a $100,000 job with a $15,000 hiring bonus and maybe stock grants of $50,000 that these jobs would cost.

set you up for life.

They would be interesting, high paying.

Plus, you know, you'd get to change the world.