No it is good for humanity, but not necessarily good for individuals who built technical foundational skills on things that will be taken over by automation.
AI as it is now and as it will be projected into the future WILL automate many skills. But not all skills. MANY MANY people will retain skills that cannot be replaced by AI. One career track that will be replaced is definetely the SWE. Or at least massively reduced in capacity if not eliminated all together.
When AI can replace most SWEs, it can cost-effectively build systems that can replace most other white-collar workers as well. It's mainly skills involving physical work that cannot be replaced without major advances in robotics. Anything done with a computer in a office will be gone if SWE is gone.
Coding is the easiest thing for the ai to do, the rules are strict, there are plenty of working code to use as example and training data. The most important is that even an ai can decide immediately if the output is good or bad (working vs not working) and try again.
All other white collar jobs does not seem to have this immediate, automatic response loop, so the ai can only rely on a human's judgement on the quality of the work. Which is slow and unreliable. The human is not going to throw an exception while reading the ai generated scientific paper. It is inconsistent, two humans can make the opposite decisions about the same output. No way for the ai to measure auccess.
It is going to change a lot of things for everyone, no question about that, but nothing like this. Coding is obsolete. Actually writing the stuff into an editor does not make any sense.
We are now shepherds, we make sure the agents are well fed and not doing anything stupid.
For me it is amazing to watch it in action, I don't mind being a shepherd :) I'm not interested in the syntax of the languages or code formatting. Tabs or spaces? Who cares, neither. I also don't like shell scripts, batch files, yaml configs, json, xml. Watching the agent going through this shit like a tank is amazing.
I agree about the shepherding role. But, I'm not sure about how hands-off the shepherding will be at well-run companies. I work on pricing software for a regulated industry. If I were to start over again from scratch on some of the systems I work on, I could certainly get AI to create a black box that prices per a spec while showing its work. I would iterate on the system and validate the output with the help of an LLM. I would make sure all edge cases are covered and lock in the behavior with "unit" tests. I'd continue to monitor the system in production.
The problem that I see with a black box approach is a lot of uncertainty about how long it will take to get the initial system reliably producing the correct output with acceptable performance. I could deal with that, but the bigger problem I see is the unpredictability of future effort to make changes to the system as my company grows (more traffic to the system, more/changed territory specific laws, more features). This uncertainty could be mitigated by an experienced software engineer guiding what gets built inside of the box. This guiding would include a familiarity with how the code is structured.
Even if one assumes a black box approach, what the box should actually do still requires the mindset of a good software engineer. Many product managers or non-technical parties requesting software won't think through and find problematic inconsistencies or gaps in the business rules they asked for. They won't anticipate how to frame the problem in a way that makes expanding upon the capabilities later easier.
So, I think the role would look like a blend of software/system architect + product manager + dev/LLM ops + QA. At least this would be true at a company that I would want to work for. I've always preferred working in small, strong teams where everyone has a lot of ownership. There will always be the LLM day equivalent of software produced by offshore teams in the early 2000s. I'm sure their modern-day ilk will excrete something that's good enough. I don't want to work for this type of company.
Nah battery power and meat based hardware will stay intrinsically ahead indefinitely.
That being said metal based robots can replace many human jobs (like server) but something like a plumber or construction worker is extremely hard to do.
AI as it is now and as it will be projected into the future WILL automate many skills. But not all skills. MANY MANY people will retain skills that cannot be replaced by AI. One career track that will be replaced is definetely the SWE. Or at least massively reduced in capacity if not eliminated all together.