If HW gets better and better, software will get easier and easier to develop as it had been happening in the last decades. And masses will create application for themselves using the "So easy to use that your mom can build it" tools which they will consider "good enough".
Think about the progression, assembly -> C/C++ -> PHP -> Ruby. Ruby wasn't a viable solution 10 years back because of its speed. But thanks to HW advances, now it’s good enough. Next extrapolate this trend. I shall stop here because the discussion will surely get depressing from here on.
But if advancement in HW stops, programmers demand will slow down too, as all software libararies and applications for that target get written and optimized.
It's a two way sword.
Actually, it appears that the only thing autonomous cars would need is the removal of traditional, unpredictable cars from the roads. (Good luck with that...)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569131
These kinds of comments about how our technology is "good enough" and will thus slow its evolutionary pace seem eerily similar to proclamations from a few decades ago that there would only be need for a few computers in the world, no computer would ever need more than a few kilobytes of memory, etc.
Do you need a 50-core CPU with 512GB of memory to run Firefox? No. However, it's a mistake to assume that tomorrow's technology will be used for the same applications as today's technology. Faster, cheaper, smaller, cooler, more efficient hardware will enable entirely new uses for computing that we can't really see right now.