I think this happens all the time. Since good programmers can automate practically everything, they tend to automate as much as makes economically sense for them.

So programming, almost by definition, always involved all tasks that are not automated yet. Programming gets easier and harder that way at the same time: Previous tasks (e.g. taking care for memory management) become easier or automated way, while harder tasks remain (larger, more complex applications, higher abstraction levels).

So I'd rephrase it that way: Engineers and programmers are effected every day by this "threat", but so far worked quite well for to their benefit, they just operate mostly on higher and higher levels, while still having to keep in mind (and having to fix) the lower levels.

Kind of full stack, with a growing stack, thinner and thinner on lower levels, but overall higher and higher.

Most (e.g. [1]) don't think of their job as being automated because most don't understand how it will happen. The issue is we only have the present way to think about how the future will work. The future will likely eliminate a lot of mundane engineering jobs (e.g. CRUD apps) with tools that provide automation (learned or programmed) and more intuitive interfaces for the layman. Not all work can be automated, but those are the edge cases. The focus is to eliminate most work, by building smarter and more niche services.

For example, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, et al have reduced the number of jobs for CMS and ecommerce developers. Zapier and IFTTT have reduced the number of integration jobs. The Grid was an experiment in creating whole websites automatically (most regard it as a failure, but the tech will likely catch up). There's research into using ML to identify and correct bugs in code. These are the low hanging fruit that will erode away at the jobs easiest to automate, leaving behind more niche work.

It's hard to imagine less work for engineers in the future because there's so much work to go around right now. That's likely the case presently because there's so many industries where manual labor can be eliminated, creating lots of new labor for engineers. Whole industries may be disrupted until corporations with automation emerge and take over. We'll likely see engineering work keep rising until there isn't as much left to automate and engineering supply catches up, at which point we'll hit "peak software engineering."

There will be engineers in the future just like there will be medical professionals in the future, but they'll probably be doing a different job and there will be a lot less work to go around. I like to think of that line of work as "escalation jobs," where when the machine fails, it goes to the human. Other work will likely get more and more scientific, theoretical and research-oriented.

1. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/24/americans-think-robots-will-t...

I disagree. Programming is the act of interacting with AI (the compiler) in language (code) detailed enough to specify what we want it to build for us. As tasks become abstracted to a single click or line of code, the programmer is free to work at higher levels of abstraction.

I guess. But it strikes me as engineers and coders will just gain more power to work in higher-level abstractions.