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.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94o-9zR2bew

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.