I remember sitting is a business class in school. The professor gave a story of how computerized spreadsheets changed the nature of accounting. Spreadsheets used to be done by hand on boards/paper. If a mistake was discovered, cascading recalculations needed to be done by hand. It was perfectly normal for large companies to have multiple teams duplicating work, then reconciling differences.

When computerized spreadsheets came about, mistakes could easily be fixed and cascading recalculations were almost instantly done. This was a game changer. Over the short term, accounting departments shrank or stagnated until the industry caught up and more sophisticated accounting started to grow the industry again. It's not coincidental that the 1980s brought in huge change to the financial industry when it did. Deregulation played a role, but so did the fact that computers exploded the productivity of the industry.

I'm not saying AI will do the same with developers, but there will always still be developers with a different set of skills, much like the way accountants don't necessarily need to be able to count in there head anymore.

They'll do some other engineering like thing...

Maybe like work in space tourism industry to Earth-Moon 5 Lagrange points.

Whether it "needs to" is its own debate.

I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?

The world average is 25% work on farms. In 24 countries the percentage is greater than 50%.

It's still over 43% in India, 20% in China, 2.5% in lots of Europe.

But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with.

For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).

But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.

Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!