Unfortunately this argument also makes a case for slavery. I’d rather not push ethics aside in favour of productivity
---
Let's take Google as a better example of an overpowering technology. Its world-domination has been built on scraping everyone else's data, and regurgitating it to users in a very useful manner. Had it been less useful, I'm sure you'd have everyone constantly complaining about them "stealing" public information.
Either way, I wasn't making a judgment of how the world should be, merely how it's probably going to work out. Copilot in its ideal final form would be: 1) great at writing good code 2) if needed, very good at obfuscating any stolen code into something that looks brand new.
Good luck fighting this mostly-undectable, productivity-boosting technology that has no obvious victims.
This is practically freeing the code. Paradoxically, open source people oppose it, but it's going to empower open source as well.
Come back with that line when the absolute number (not to mention the pay) of developer jobs worldwide starts decreasing because of this. It will probably happen by the end of the next decade.
Devaluing all human intelligence (which is what the endgoal of all those advanced models is) is not "moving forward" in my book.
As for the physical vs cognitive labor: we automate the bottlenecks. Back in the day that was physical and now it's cognitive labor.
Also, let's not forget that right now programmers are one of the best compensated professions. For the non-tech businesses, we are the expensive gatekeepers for the world of software. Need to build a non-trivial tech solution? You could easily end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for devs to write it and maintain it.
If that instead can be done by the end-user themselves or with less employees, I'm sure they will be super happy to save resources. Or maybe you don't care about these people?
Turning people into economically useless appendages (at best being consumers at the mercy of state-dispensed UBI) is not something to celebrate but a dystopia. So is destroying the ability of humans to achieve station in life because of their cognitive ability. I however don't think we will find common ground regarding that question.