Would this be happening if industry was forced to pay for the real cost to society of the AI that is replacing the programmers? Just the subsidized resource use alone, accompanied by its associated carbon load, is staggering. Add the massive theft of IP and personal data used to train the models, as well as the underpaid Third World "moderator" labor involved in cleaning up all that scraped data, and you get the picture. All those laid off programmers would be a bargain in comparison, and their compensation would contribute to a more vibrant and equitable economy.

I'm all for letting the market decide these things, so long as costs aren't socialized, especially as blatantly as is happening in the case of AI.