The invention of the cotton gin simply moved people from spinning cotton to picking cotton. And increased demand for slaves.

I'm not excited to be displaced personally, but I'm also not really worried about being displaced. If displacement is inevitable, I don't see how the average programmer is going to leverage this for the "stuff of dreams". Usually, tech advancements result in a greater consolidation of wealth into the hands of those that already own capital. Recent tech is no exception. Yes, there has been a lot of wealth created for regular people, but we're still working 40+ hour weeks, and earnings have not matched the increase in productivity.

What I am concerned about is that our field is becoming increasingly arcane magic for the younger generations, especially the masses that are being completely and utterly failed by the education system.

Between 2016 and 2021, I've been of the opinion that I cannot make any reasonable forecast of even vague large-scale social/technological/economic development past 2030, because the trends in technology go all funky around then.

Thanks to recent developments in AI (textual and visual), I no longer feel confident predicting any of those things past about the beginning of 2028.

It's not a singularity, it's an event horizon: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/09/20/not-a-singu...

I don't see a world where programming isn't the last thing to go. We pretty much have a general intelligence when a "programmer" is no longer needed. That doesn't mean programming will look anything like it does today in 200 years but will the profession, doing kinda the sameish thing, still exist? Absolutely!

Whenever I watch Geordi and Data doing something in engineering, they’re often talking to the computer about constructing models and sims and such.

To me this is the most ultimate form of declarative programming. Not that we will all be talking it out, but that we will explain in natural language what we’re after.

It maximizes how much time we spend in the “problem understanding/solving” phase and minimizes the tedium of actually setting up the apparatus.

I mean, yes? People will be doing math as long as there are people around to do it. It'll look different, sure. But there will always be problems, and math/programming is problem solving par excellence.

These assisted coding systems are tremendously exciting but they are only the analogue of moving from a shovel to a powered excavator; it still needs a trained individual who knows what the final result needs to look like to a fairly high technical level to be effective. So, yes, 25-50 years from now humans will still be be the principal element in writing software.

Yeah, in the future there will be only AIs developing apps and AIs using apps.

There won't be apps, actually, they'll do everything programmatically.

And all humans would have been killed by then in an AI doom.