Cars didn’t eliminate the need for someone to still operate transportation, going from horses to cars to ships just changed the vessel and if anything opened up more jobs as efficiency increased. We may have to adjust our roles as software engineers, but wholesale eliminating the role as a job family feels a bit difficult to picture. When software written by an LLM (which has been trained on human written code) ultimately fails or has some bug/edge case, I don’t think TPMs will have much fun debugging outages via their LLM..

Horses were never employed for operating transportation and so the analogy was never about the change to operating transportation. It's about the mode of transportation itself.

If AI gets as good as the people building it hope it will, then it doesn't matter what new jobs crop up or what opportunities there are left to uncover, the machine will just handle it.

If we had some sort of enhancement that makes horses 500% faster and stronger, we probably would.

Don't think so. They need medical care, food. And a 500% strength horse is still not as fast as a semi truck.

Automobiles need maintenance and fuel. Both of which created additional jobs.

Those jobs will only exist as long as they're necessary.

Maybe that's why we measure the transportation vehicles they were replaced by in horsepower.

Wrong analogy. The horse wasn't employed, the driver was. The horse was just a tool used by the driver.

Faulty logic. The horse was the best means to an end; currently, human programmers are the best means to a different end.

Your argument will only apply when humans are no longer needed at any point in the pipeline.

I fail to see why you think so. The better AI becomes, the less need for humans in the pipeline there may be, even if that number is not zero.

Someone still needs to communicate to the computer exactly what they want and the computer has to understand that. So far, that has been tried unsuccessfully many times, and I don't see that changing with AI