There are some parallels to induced demand in road construction: when you build a new road to ease traffic, traffic increases to use up that capacity. But that isn't a sign that demand is infinite, it's just that demand is limited by the available resources. If you keep building roads, at some point they will become emptier. Similarly, at some point development productivity will outpace demand, and we will start optimizing our own jobs away.
In your example programmers are the monks or the press makers. At some point we're not needed any more (at least at the same scale) since word processors have already been built.
There are more newspapers but they are all owned by larger players which means different types of machines and parts.
A better example might have been blacksmiths. Although the amount of people making cars is a larger group.
If you read the whole article it shows a path to new jobs...
Digital printing has become the fastest growing industry segment as printers embrace this technology. Most commercial printers now do some form of digital printing.
Manufacturing deals with making 3D objects.I think 3D printing belongs there.
makes more sense to think about GPT-2 like language models replacing authors, than word processors
Anthropologists estimate that the work week was at 20 hrs at the end of the Stone Age. We have been inventing new problems in the vacuum created by our successes for, literally, millennia.
Most of the stuff there would be just... normal now. It's quite unusual for SPAs to have a decent consistent UX. And the slowness would never have been tolerated back in the day.
Looked at retrospectively, forms were just one step above green screen applications on a terminal, transplanting one set of structural idioms to another, like for like.
I see massive sea change in connectivity and immersiveness of today, but not really in what we're trying to achieve.
I'm not saying they were halcyon days. I'm saying that the effort to do things is not necessarily less these days, in part because we have different expectations (not necessarily requirements) today.
I very much agree with your comment, but allow me a little nitpicking. Solutions aren't 90%, more like 50% or 20% or whatever. It may sound absurd to discuss a number there, since it's more like a way of speaking, just wanted to add that for most problems the solution is barely better than the default option.
In other words, there's still a lot of room for improvement, huge actually but, as you say, it might come in small pieces.
The problem here is that word "all". It's never going to be easy to do everything. Some part will be hard. That's where the value lies, and that's what your best people focus on. But everything else will be abstracted away. It's already happened. 30 years ago making a GUI was hard, but VB changed that. Then making a web app was hard, but PHP changed that. Then app layout was hard, and Bootstrap changed that. Then ML was hard, and Torch changed that. Every hard problem gets a 90% working solution that's more than good enough for most companies. There'll always be a few companies that pay people to work in the last 10%, so the problem never really disappears, but fewer and fewer people work on it.
The key to keeping growth going in tech is to keep finding new problems, not to keep everyone working on the same old problems.