Will any careers exist? How do you even plan for that
The honest answer is via politics not education, but this debate is often had in "apolitical" circles that try their best to ignore this.
The second reason is that we often prefer humans to do it even if a machine can do it faster / cheaper. Sometimes, it's a status thing. For example, some people will buy Ikea furniture, some will have it custom made by a local craftsman. In fact, it's sort of the hallmark of the upper middle class that you can spend more for that human touch. Cupcakes from an artisanal bakery, private banker, etc.
Now, I don't think there's enough people who want to pay extra for human-made software. From the current trends in the industry, my impression is that we don't value our craft, so it would be surprising if others did. For mathematicians, I don't know; it's a bit painful to watch.
This is correct under present day thinking.
But imagine the accounting AI of twenty years hence. If it can reliably do the books, reduce and prevent fraud, significantly better than any human ever could, why would you still need the human in that loop?
In the present day it's a legal requirement, not to mention a practical requirement given present AI capabilities. That doesn't mean it still will be in the future.
To put it another way, if the human is on the hook for the agent, but the agent is proven by a decade+ of statistical evidence to be way less mistake/fraud prone than the human, what's the point of the human there?
What we're seeing so far is consistent with the training data being the upper bound for capabilities. They get better at recall / synthesis / reasoning over the corpus, but they don't, for example, acquire trans-human ethics; they're at best as ethical as we are, except not grounded by the fear of consequences. A perfectly-behaved, perfectly-moral LLM is not a given in 20 years, not unless your position is that there's room for unbounded, exponential self-improvement without any loss of fidelity. In that case, we'll probably have problems more pressing than the outlook for accounting jobs.
Not needing to work is a neat future that might be ahead of us. But it could unlock some new negatives as well as positives.
https://youtube.com/shorts/CaJd88zh1h0?feature=shared
Free money and universal healthcare thanks to the abundance of Ai is where "they," say we are headed. Thanks to Ai ravaging our civil society we are use to.