The "problem" is that as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work. Unless the complexity of the work scales as well. I've always felt that programmers would be the first class of knowledge workers to be put out of work by automation. This may be the beginning of the end for the programming gravy train.
> The "problem" is that as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work.
This will lower the entry barrier to developing software so more people will go into the field. Before you needed to know a programming language, now you will just have a dialogue with a language model.
> I've always felt that programmers would be the first class of knowledge workers to be put out of work by automation.
We've been automating our work for 70 years, and look how many programmers are employed now. The more we automate, the more capable our field becomes and more applications pop up.
>This will lower the entry barrier to developing software so more people will go into the field.
Indeed. The ideal future of programming is something out of star trek. I often noticed how everyone on the ship is a programmer of a sort, they whip up a simulation as the problem warrants regardless of their field. But in this future, the job of programmer basically doesn't exist. As a programmer, I should be allowed to have mixed feelings about that.
Let your imagination fly. We always want more than it's possible, our wishes fill up any volume like an expanding gas. Humans are going to be crucial to orchestrate AI and extract the most utility out of it.
> as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work
Yes, but the total amount of work (and surrounding complexity) also increases with it. Just look at the evolution of the software industry over the last few decades.
History isn't a great guide here. Historically the abstractions that increased efficiency begat further complexity. Coding in Python elides over low-level issues but the complexity of how to arrange the primitives of python remains for the programmer to engage with. AI coding has the potential to elide over all the complexity that we identify as programming. I strongly suspect this time is different.
Yes, this is how you increase prosperity (see: agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, etc). You can now create more with the same number of people.
