His thesis seems plausible, but I’m far from convinced. It seems equally plausible to me that as software gets easier to write, we just write more software. Industrialization of clothing meant the amount of labor required to create clothing dropped drastically. However more people are employed in clothing and fashion related industries than ever, because we now just own and wear more clothes than ever before.
Won’t we just write more software?
I'm not sure that some common engineering problems now being solved doesn't just mean that we can now redistribute that workforce on other unsolved problems, or to build new products on-top of those solutions.
Another thing that was commonly said over the 2000s period is that all software jobs would be quickly outsourced to India. That didn't happen either. Some big companies obviously tried that (and some still do) but a lot of them eventually realized that software wasn't something you could just specify and outsource to a team far away, with a different time zone, culture and language and expect to magically get working software as a result. In the meantime, I think that demand for software in India has also grown. I laughed at loud when in the early 2010s I received an email from an Indian recruitment agent offering me to come work in India.
Those jobs just moved to Bangladesh. I think they are just as inefficient as always. But the west traded textile jobs for other forms of service industries and more complex manufacturing. No one makes clothing inside a western country as cheaply as they do in Asia, but the conditions in Asia are not heavily automated. They just have more people and an economies at a stage where that sort of work will provide.
I suspect we'll just make more software. You still have to think and there's an upper limit to how much you can automate, and how costly that last jump from some automation to full automation will take.
To weave enough cloth to make a single shirt by hand takes orders of magnitude more time than it takes for a loom to produce the same amount of cloth. This is true regardless of what country it happens in and how much the person operating the loom is paid. Yes, the cheap clothes one can buy at H&M, Uniqlo, or Gap are made in Southeast Asia, usually by workers being paid inhumanely low wages. But those clothes are universally made with fabric that is produced by looms and other modern machinery.
My point is just that the volume of clothes produced today (in southeast Asia, for example) would require orders of magnitude more workers to produce in a pre-industrial world.
Despite this massive efficiency jump, there are not less jobs in clothing and fashion related industries; there are more because we wear so much more clothes than we used to.
that's because a lot of what used to be possible only on desktop has been moved into web-based SaaS or mobile.
If you count mobile phones as "desktops" - there's millions more apps on mobile than there are on real desktops.
Software will likely dominate all other industries, as the absolute essence of automation is software.