Artists didn't stop because the camera made it possible to do what otherwise took hours with a canvas and oils.
The nature of programming may change, but it's still about using computers to solve problems.
--- Putting on the old guy hat ---
You kids didn't learn programming from magazine articles typing in your favorite little game into a computer that went away when you powered it off.
You didn't have to toggle in a boot loader before you could use the computer.
You didn't dream of one day having a modem and being able to call BBSs, then dream of your own phone line that you didn't have to share.
Yet, ya'll turned out ok, despite all those changes.
It'll be ok, kid... it'll be OK.
Computer programs will always be complex beasties with bugs hiding in the corners. There will always be a class of people willing to find those bugs and make things easier to use. You are that type of person, right? Good!
I personally do very well for myself, being in the top 1% of earners in my generation. It deeply concerns me that I can barely afford to buy a house despite this fact. Most of my peers can't even dream of doing something like buying a house right now. And why is this happening? Because computers are being used to extract vast amounts of value from the system to be captured by a tiny fraction of people who are increasingly owning everything. AI will only accelerate this trend.
And perhaps I'm one of the lucky ones to have carved out a good career for myself, but everywhere I look, I see folks struggling more and more. And stuff like AI is about to make life a whole lot harder for them. Yuval Harari talked about the rise of the "useless class" [0], and the challenges with mass unemployment in the future when AI has replaced many jobs.
You can repeat the "it'll be OK" mantra as much as you want, that doesn't make it true.
This was at the beginning of the software revolution. Growth of the industry was huge and fast. Entrants into the field were virtually guaranteed a decent career with little competition and almost no automation.
Those days are over. We are dealing with a relatively mature industry now with a new ai tool that is limited by hardware processing power instead of more biological beings. Low level / beginning programming skills will no longer be needed and experienced programmers will evolve into roles that will drive the ai tools at a high level to create solutions, occasionally debug tricky issues that the ai created, and implement code that the ai is unable to generate properly. The last task is the one that will determine the remaining role of the human developer.
And so far it only increased the demand for software, because for anyone outside software development, cheaper software just means you can leverage your budget to get better faster.
I actually feel my university education prepared me well for what’s going on. I studied a mix of theoretical comp science, physics, philosophy, and mathematics (esp calculus and number theory). Very little of what I learned is obsoleted, and especially probability theory and NLP are turning out to be very valuable to know when working with even CoPilot.
But man, I feel bad for those studying “programming” as a trade rather than computer science as a scientific / engineering discipline.
Domain knowledge about specific industries and what is required by the software seems the more valuable skillset going forward. How does physics and computer science help with that? Communication skills and ability to learn new, more unstructured domains is likely to be more critical like those learned by strong liberal arts disciplines, for example.
