In fact, most of the tasks described in those futuristic books didn't involve programming, I suspect they were examples of how you could ask your HAL 9000 to tell you how much is 9999 * 9999 and it would give you the answer in human voice. A lot of the tasks which would have required programming in the 80s are now solved by one of the millions of apps, so that's another angle.
Maybe we're not exactly were sci-fi predicted we'd be at, but there are a lot of things that sci-fi didn't even dream of that we take for granted.
Even the dev environments of today. You'd think they only include the text editor/IDE, but you've also got the browser, google and stackoverflow, github and a myriad of tools and libraries to help use build more and more complex apps.
The fact is, today's programmer-for-hire is an interface between the client (app inventor/architect) and the machine, just like secretaries were interfaces between their boss' spoken messages and the typewritten letters.
And if something can be optimized away by technology someday it will. Maybe it won't involve spoken language (although, why not, if it's done right?), but my bet is that programming will be less of a profession and more of a skill that you learn by using powerful tools.
I still remember books about software engineering written in the 80s (mainly intended for manager types) which, in their opening chapters after an explanation of how the discipline of "software engineering" evolved to the present day, painted a rosy-ass picture of the future by describing the year 2010 in which software architects lounged about in easy chairs and gave plain-English directions to HAL 9000 workstations -- replete with line drawings of retrofuturistic offices straight out of The Jetsons, The Incredibles, or Logan's Run.
Needless to say, 2010 came and went and the state of the craft had evolved microscopically compared to anticipated advances despite having plenty more CPU cycles to burn on ever more complicated tooling. In some ways it has regressed. The know-how which produced Unix and ARPANET on limited hardware with limited resources, inside academic, industrial, and government departments which got little recognition or respect, is in short enough supply that we may not be able to repeat the feat if we had to do it all over again.
Alan Kay maintains that programming is pop culture because we don't remember our history but it's worse than that. We're like a primitive Mesopotamian tribe from antiquity who had a history but forgot it except for bits and pieces which got written down and became Religion. Things like "GO TO considered harmful", "object-oriented programming is good", "DRY", "refactoring", "design patterns", etc.
We're saddled with object-oriented programming -- and its attendant complexity -- for life. But most of us don't understand how OO came to be, why it might be good, or what the tradeoffs are vs. other programming methods because we don't ask ourselves these questions.
Design patterns should be treated like TV Tropes, replete with having maybe a great wiki describing them all, and allowing the addition of new ones as well as admitting variations and inversions. Instead we treat them like nam-shubs, strict instructions handed down from the gods on what to do under these circumstances to achieve this result.
And in this culture we await the day when, magically, the Machines will spontaneously evolve the intelligence to relieve us of the burden of software design specifics!