There's a certain irony in masters of automation lamenting that their roles are being automated. I wonder whether the jobs their efforts eroded in the past ever got the same thoughts...
Programming, logic, etc are skills and toolkits. The optimal state of society is everybody being able to apply them, not just the enlightened compsci caste. There was a time in the past where scribes were paid nice cash for their efforts, too.
I guess the lesson to learn here is treating a toolkit as an identity and job for life. By virturee of the essence of the job itself - if the tool gets cheaper and more widespread, it's aactually success, not betrayal.
You say that the optimal state of society is for everyone to apply programming and logic etc. but the obvious final result of these developments is that no one will.
Maybe the artform will be lost, but surely humanity will inherently be more 'logical' and systems driven afterwards?
Maybe using writing as an analogy is flawed, but most of humanity having 'writing' as a core skill did enable many other things, even if oral storytelling cultures suffered at its hand.
At its core, tech is all about breaking through inefficiencies and barriers. Does it matter if people can't code python if people demand government systems be frictionless in the year 2500?
Sincerely, how is prompting an AI to build software for you building "logic and systems thinking"?
The thing many people are ringing the alarms over is the offloading of critical thinking and knowledge work to LLMs.
Being able to program isn't the end game of critical thinking. Programming languages are just a way of representing the processes. The thinking underneath was always more important, and there's now technically more time freed up to focus on that. Billions of people now have access to tools which will aid them in reasoning through complex problems without needing a $100k CS degree. Of course some people are using LLMs to get recipe inspiration, but others are now empowered to do things which were impossible for them before.
I personally think the alarm ringers are mainly the privileged elite who are scared of their moats beyond filled in. LLMs have effectively broken down the gates of access to knowledge. In a diverse world, having more people being empowered to do more things has to be a net positive.
You clearly haven’t observed anyone actually using AI.
I've come across lots of novel uses, though. I've seen non-technical people in law, education, hr, all spin up interesting projects/workflows which have helped their jobs/lives. The most interesting was a teacher who's dropped powerpoint, and is creating interactive lesson experiences; mainly presenting the content through popular games and creating engaging activities to apply the content. A recent one was a mock UN summit presented like a game of Civ with territory mechanics. Absolutely zero tech background, just curiosity.
Once people get over a few hurdles, things like: >tech's too confusing >$20 is a lot of money to spend on a subscription >AI is just a fancy search engine >AI will do all the work for me
You start unlocking a fair bit of creativity in people. I mean, all this is brand new stuff even for tech-savvy people. It'll take a while for the genuinely useful uses to dissipate out into the maasses.
Not everything has to be a billion dollar business.