This will probably make the already-bad computer security/infosec situation significantly worse. In general, people pasting snippets they don't understand is bad news; but at least in the case of StackOverflow, there's voting and comments, which can catch the most egregious stuff. On the other hand, consider the headline snippet on the Copilot's landing page:

// Determine whether the sentiment of text is positive
// Use a web service
async function isPositive(text: string): Promise<boolean> {
  const response = await fetch(`http://text-processing.com/api/sentiment/`, {
    method: "POST",
    body: `text=${text}`,
    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
    },
  });
  const json = await response.json();
  return json.label === "pos";
}

Everything below the function prototype was AI generated. And, this code has TWO security vulnerabilities! First, it's using an http URL, rather than https. And second, if the input string has newlines, it can put values into fields other than the ones intended. In this specific case, with the text-processing.com sentiment analysis API demo, there's not much to do with that (the only documented field available other than text is language), but if this is representative, then we are probably in for some bad times.

One of the major, surprising consequences of this is that it's likely to become infeasible to develop software in secret. If AI tools like this confer a large advantage, and the tools are exclusively cloud hosted, then maintaining the confidentiality of a code base will mean forgoing these tools, and if the impact of these tools is large enough, then forgoing them may not be feasible.

On the plus side, this will put malware developers at something of a disadvantage. It might increase the feasibility of preventing people from running dangerous AI experiments (which sure seem like they're getting closer by the day). On the minus side, this creates an additional path to internet takeover, and increases centralization of power in general.

It entirely depends on how good it is.

I gave Kite a real go for a month and kept hoping it would get better.  It didn't and I stopped using it because it hindered more than it helped.

(Also, I bet the folks at Kite are not happy right now!)

My prediction is that the main impact is to make it easier for people to throw together quick MVPs and prototypes. It might also make it easier for people to jump into new languages or frameworks.

I predict it won't impact mainstream corporate programming much. The dirty secret of most tech companies is that programmers don't actually spend that much time programming. If I only spend 5 hours per week writing code, cutting that time down to 4 hours while potentially reducing code quality isn't a trade anyone will really want to make.

I expect its impact will mostly be in helping junior devs get around the "blank page" problem quickly. I don't see it having much impact beyond that, not with GPT-3 being the backend

If Copilot improves programming significantly-enough it might be a huge blow to makers of other IDE's and text editors unless they provide an API for others to use. I don't expect re-implementing Copilot-esque prediction is in the wheelhouse of places like Jetbrains or any of the open source editors. 

According to the FAQ they're focusing on VS Code which comes from the same parent company as Github (Microsoft).

I expect that it will help with the tedious parts of programming that require you to know details about specific libraries. It will make those parts of programming that are "google -> stackoverflow -> find correct answer -> copy-paste into code" much fater, but I expect it to struggle on truly novel stuff, on scientific programming and anything research-level. If this thing can auto-complete a new finite-element PDE solver in a way that isn't useless, I will be both impressed and scared.