The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
The steady progress of the Industrial Revolution that has made the average person unimaginably richer and healthier several times over, looks in the moment just like this:
"Oh no, entire industries of people are being made obsolete, and will have to beg on the streets now".
And yet, as jobs and industries are automated away, we keep getting richer and healthier.
"It'll massively suck for you, but don't worry, it'll be better for everyone else" is little comfort for most of us
If I can just ask for a certain arbitrary machine state (with some yet unrealized future version of AI) who needs programmers?
We’ll need to vet AI output so there will still be knowledge work; we’re not going to let the AI decide to launch nukes, or inject whatever level of morphine it wants.
Data entry (programming being specialized data entry; code is a data model of primitives for a compiler/interpreter) work at a computer is not long for this world but analysis will be.