GitHub Copilot: A Tool or Doom for Programmers?

And should you be worried about losing your job?

Editing by the author, original photo by Lala Azizli from Unsplash.

Since GitHub Copilot has been released, it has brought both amazement and scare to the developer community. Many are afraid Copilot will put programming jobs in danger by rendering humans obsolete, while others are still very skeptical about it taking over the market in the near future and do not worry as much.

To better understand the situation and make a judicious prediction, we first have to take a look at what happened in the past in similar circumstances.

How natural selection comes into play

Back in 1858, a simple man by the name of Charles Darwin proposed the concept of natural selection, a natural mechanism of evolution through which individuals survive and effectively reproduce more than others due to differences in their phenotype, which is the set of observable characteristics of an organism such as size or behavior.

Natural selection, and thus survival of a species, is a function of the environment and how fit an individual is. The phrase “survival of the fittest”, coined by Herbert Spencer, means that the apter an organism is to its environment, the more chances it has to survive and thus reproduce.