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by derringer 4881 days ago
You're likely being down voted because since the invention of programming the field has been continuously becoming "easier" often by leaps and bounds. However, programmers always remain at the edge of the boundary so there is continuously more work for programmers, not less. Every component of what made things "easy" can be improved by making it more flexible, performant etc. and doing this most believe will always require a skilled programmer.

But to play devils advocate, if we were to create true artificial intelligence (I guess it would just be intelligence at that point) then not only would programmers be obsolete, but all of humanity would be obsolete. We'd all just be WALL-E style mouths to feed. This seems difficult to imagine, but we already see it happening in some ways. Unemployment is high almost everywhere and there's no fundamental economic law that every human on the planet can contribute sufficiently to match said human's consumption.

Essentially what this means is we have two pretty rough options. First, all of these people fall under the welfare state. The homeless and hungry all get what they need through governments, NGOs and charities. The other is the Darwinian approach, nature's great equalizer. Both of these options suck pretty hard, but that may be the world we're looking at until our robot overlords turn us into batteries (although it's more likely we'd become pets if anything at all).