The invention of compilers was a huge watershed moment for programming. All the manual labor you had to do, keeping track of memory layouts and registers and stack frames, was handled automatically for you. Yet the result is not that programming became easier - it's that programs became more complex. A journeyman programmer today can write Tetris in a few hours, while it took how many months for the original? But modern games are things like Starcraft 2 and Halo, not Tetris and Space Invaders.

Same with databases. It used to be that you had to think in terms of bytes in sectors on a disk. Now we have filesystems and databases and query languages to abstract that all away from us. But that doesn't mean programming the systems becomes easier, it means that the volume and variety of data stored increases.

It used to be that domains like speech recognition, natural language processing, text mining, computer vision, OCR, etc. were completely off-limits for computational approaches. Now we have standard libraries for them, and standardized tools for generating those standard libraries. But that just means the tools get applied to progressively more problems, not that solving those problems becomes easier.

I think this is what Marc Andreesen meant when he said that "Software is eating the world". There will eventually come a time when no more software engineers will be needed, when they have automated themselves out of a job. But that time will come when everything we do is computerized, when every aspect of modern life is ruled by algorithms and data. Until then, advances in technology just mean computation can be applied to more and more problem domains.