[djexjms]

A lot of the top comments seem to be saying no. I'll go ahead and make the argument that, yes, this technology will eventually pretty much end most programmers jobs. I'm not talking about tomorrow. Even if the technology was perfect right now (which it is not), it takes time for organizations to adapt to change. I am also not talking about something as far away as 20 years in the future either. I think in as little as five years, we will see a very measurable decrease in paid programmers due to automation. In the short term many of them may be shunted over to code review and QA workflows, but the idea that the programming industry is somehow special, and will be the exception to the rule that increasing automation in a field decreases the number of people employed in that field seems a bit groundless to me. Someone used the example of heavy equipment and shoveling dirt. Yes. There are still people employed in the business of moving around dirt. But the percentage of the population that is so employed definitely went down with the invention of things like backhoes. Take it from a guy who was actually employed at a job that involved moving around a lot of dirt. I used to work for a water utility company. Hearing the old timers talk, you realized that the work crews used to be a whole lot bigger. Backhoes existed, but they were very expensive weren't yet ubiquitous. The backhoes would be reserved for the most complex or deep dig sites. Otherwise it was shovel time. The crews had to be bigger. Now every dig crew has a backhoe; the standard dig crew is four guys, but you can totally get a dig done with just three, if one of them called out. That being said, people do still get paid to move dirt around. You still need somebody to operate the machinery. But if a magical backhoe was released tomorrow that could reliably and safely dig on its own, it would without a doubt be adopted as soon as the organization had the money for it. Digging is a huge source of liability; the monetary incentive would be quite high.

Now earth-moving is one industry. Let's talk for a minute about another industry. Ice cutting. The ice trade was a huge industry in the 19th century. At its peak it employed 90,000 people in the United States alone. It was ended almost overnight by the invention of the refrigerator. Hardly anybody even remembers that it was a thing. The world went on without a thought. That is another possible outcome of automation. And as scary as it is, I'd still rather have my refrigerator.

So maybe the programming industry survives, and just employees fewer people, or maybe it goes the way of the ice trade, and in a century or two it will just be a footnote of history that people used to have to manually program computers.