Imagine you were a clockmaker at the time the first electric clocks (e.g., General Electric's Telechron) were introduced. Suddenly the skills you worked so hard to acquire and which gave you such satisfaction were obsolete.
White color jobs won't go away, but they will become progressively less satisfying and less lucrative.
And yes, programmers are going to be hit hardest. Other white collar jobs more or less have some barriers or are already too cheap to be replaced.
I predict frontends and data people are the first to be impacted. Reasons: 1) too close to business, 2) in general not really very technical.
The other threat is of course reducing the number of people needed. Like an automatic loom. Again not to worried. I think that will generate new demand.
The deepfake side of things is more scary IMO.
Automatic loom is something different because — like other progresses in history — it just automated manual work. This and other industrial progresses gradually led most jobs to shift from manual to office-type work. Computers automated the boring/“mechanical” parts of thinking (simulations, solving equations, etc.) but now they are taking over the whole thinking part: intuition, systemization, requirements gathering, soft skills, etc. Nothing will be spared as far as I see.
Stakeholders at the top of the ladder will still be there (as they will own the means of production — AI + compute centers) but they will mostly just instruct AI to do what they want. AI will ask clarifying questions, do research, maybe spin up a few dozen of instances of themselves to simulate the emergent results of having a group of people/an organization design and think things through, rather than a lone-wolf kind of thing.
They just make too many mistakes and are not really thinking. I think they are a dead end. If the scenario you talk about happens it is because we discover some new architecture previously unthought of as well as advancement in processor efficiency and price.
There's certainly not "a clear way forward", even though one may hope the billions invested will lead to algorithmic breakthroughs.
I don't think there's anything like consensus on this. There isn't even consensus on whether AGI is possible in the first place.
All of this seems to be predicated on "LLMs suddenly magically becoming intelligent", and it's just not at all clear why people think that might happen.
Same goes for most other white collar stuff, even moreso for, say, lawyers and accountants (where, really, part of the job is _taking responsibility_).
Programming is the easy part. It really isn't hard and has never been hard to write software that generates code and other software. We've been doing that since the early 2000s with frameworks like winforms, and oh yeah compilers. The only difference now is that we're doing statistical analysis that costs literally billions of dollars in order to generate that code with a data first approach.
To generate code that actually does what you want and what your client wants, all while not being a clusterfuck of spaghetti that breaks after 6 months of changes? That's the challenging part.
So sure, if you need someone to hold your hand every step of the way in order to get a task done and to literally tell you step by step what must be done after two years of being a junior developer, then yeah you probably don't have a bright future. However, that'd be true regardless of if the AI boom was present or not.
To answer the question more directly: no I'm not afraid.
It's also better at soft skills, communication, understanding requirements and humans, and so on. I don't really see what will be left for white-collar workers once intelligence is completely automated. I think blue-collar jobs are safe for the most part, which is unprecedented in history.
A small subset of workers will be able to swim upstream and capture value from the tools, and that might only be for some limited window of time.
Exciting times though.
I think AI poses a threat to knowledge though. Being able to distinguish between what is real and what is not is becoming increasingly more difficult.
If I make an analogy to nature & evolution, there's been a rapid change in the "environment" we need to survive in. There will be many causalities, but it's not your fault, so just focus on surviving for now, and you will eventually thrive.
It comes with a huge cognitive dissonance to force ourselves to change, and it's going to be a battle with ourselves during this quick adaptation and reprogramming phase as we learn new ways to solve old problems more efficiently.
In concrete terms, that means that blue-collar workers are protected for exponentially less time than you expect because at this rate of progress the limits of robotics automation are getting piled through
So to answer your question I do think that AI will create greater and greater pressure for many jobs starting from bad software engineers and gradually but quickly eating up through every part of society.
I will be a psychiatrist in a few years and know that there are ways to practice psychiatry that really only rely on easy soft skills and applying pharmacological heuristics and guidelines. Of course, all of this can be very well accomplished by not so frontier models in not so long from now.
But for every given job though, there are ways to practice them that are completely irreplaceable. The software engineer that invents Linux. The psychiatrist that does miracles with mostly his voice. The mechanic who has invaluable insights. And golden fingers. and then of course it is extremely hard to get at this level of mastery if you have never been able to practice as a beginner this job because AI took the place of junior level work.
So yeah I am sometimes scared that AI will completely replace huge swaths of society but then that seems so extreme and yet so believable the only thing I can think of is that prediction markets are maybe among the most important technology right now to figure out our best moves at both individual and societal levels.
I don’t think I will disappear as an interpreter between the machine and the imprecise meatware known as a product owner. Maybe I will need to move in that direction more myself.
Will I write much code by hand? I doubt it. Debug maybe.