[thavalai]

Lots of commenters seem to think that programmers are safe for a while. As a programmer, I sincerely hope they are right.

But, the majority of developers I know, including myself, are ultimately writing software to be used by humans, typically presenting data that is comprehensible to humans, so that they can make decisions.

If AI advances to the point where similar decisions can be made by machines, looking at the same data, then I fear that entire classes of applications will disappear, and with them, the need for developers who build them.

Obviously, we'll still need developers, though perhaps far fewer than are needed today. Perhaps software development will go through the same revolution that agriculture did, where from we went from > 90% to < 3% of the population being involved.

[eitally]

This is already nascent, but growing quickly, in a field typically called things like "robotic process automation" or "cognitive computing". Essentially, eliminating the need for wide swaths of CRUD and business process enterprise applications, and the developers who create them (and the sysadmins who support them, etc etc).