I didn't mean to imply that automation through programming is always bad. Like with any technology that increases productivity, there are many obvious benefits. We have all benefited enormously on the consumer side of the economy, for example. But I think it's recently become a lot clearer to many in the tech industry that automation can have downsides too, and those downsides are not evenly distributed. This truth was there all along, but because we were shielded from it for so long, we were able to look away. Not anymore.

Any computational task done by a computer could in principle be done by a person, albeit billions of times slower and with a larger error rate. If computer programs could not automate certain practical tasks -- that is to say, do them much more reliably and efficiently than people do them -- they would be an academic curiosity studied by a handful of professors instead of a central part of modern infrastructure.

So I'm sceptical of your claim not to have eliminated a single job. You might not have removed an existing job, but couldn't people be paid to do the work your code does?