I find that very unlikely. I think the result will be similar to what has happened to the electronics industry.

For those who aren’t aware, PCB design used to be an automated task, done by software with minor tweaks. The thing is, complexity had a positive payoff, so soon we had trained technicians doing layout. Right now most PCB layout require so much technical knowledge most people working in layout are engineers with masters degree.

Of course there’s also a lot of cheap electronics where complexity doesn’t payoff and cutting development cost it’s what matters, but it’s not most of the market.

As long as you keep learning and improving, you are likely to see an increase of demand, not a decrease, although the job will be quite different.

I had to help debug an autorouted PCB about 20 years ago, the traces between the CPU and SDRAM went three times round the board.

Now that you mention it. I have a Masters in electronics, and I did a lot of layouting in the last 3 years. Not that big or complicated, but it is becoming a significant portion of my engineering time. It is perceived to be cheaper to just do the layouting in house because our system is small and benefit from fast iteration.

No way, to replace software engineers one would have to have GAI, which we are lightyears away from.

The hard part of code writing is not the “transform this logic to code”, but to come up with the logic in the first place, which is pretty much transform this and that requirement into logic first. Which does often need domain specific knowledge, and possibly interaction with the client.

Requirement logic and interaction with customer to shape it is the domain of the Business Analyst (or similar position). I can imagine that BAs in our company, equipped with a slightly better version of the Copilot, could prepare a lot of code. BAs in our company have limited knowledge of coding. Yet I'm quite certain that they are capable of selecting the right implementation proposed by the Copilot, in most cases. Without resorting to developer's help, they would just click to prepare are routine. Like automated checkouts in the supermarkets, they don't make the checkout jobs disappear completely, but they're substantially reducing the need for them.

If your reality of not needing software developers comes true, so will the reality of robots will do all the manual labour.

(Still learn to renovate as it is an awesome skill)

Of course the robots will take all the manual labor over. However, the machines will take IT jobs much faster. Most likely one or two decades sooner.

+1 Sorry you were downvoted for a reasonable position. I would like to predict that most knowledge work will be automated, including understanding business needs and doing designs, coding, and maintenance. However, I think that we will reach the same conclusion with AGI but in ways we can’t predict right now. Just deep learning won’t get us there on its own but that is a different conversation.

It still amazes me when people doubt or underestimate what can happen in future tech.

I think a lot of people massively overestimate the current state of AI. Unless there is some fundamental breakthrough in computation, I just don’t see how complex knowledge based jobs will be replaced any time soon. Maybe in 50 years. Maybe.

I don't really understand this point of view. The day demand for software developers diminishes, but demand for manual laborers remains, I will start to automate manual labor.

Automating house renovation or even house building is a challenge which will take a few decades more. Some trouble of bricklayer automation described in today's HN: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/where-are-the-rob...