[marto1]

> How this plays out is a good question.

Look into what happened to Japanese wood printers around the time of the industrial revolution over there. It was a many layer apprenticeship system where everyone had a separate job - the bottom layer, mostly children, would make prints for candy wrappers and such until you get to the top - the masters which dealt with the most valuable and skilled work.

The lowest layers got cut, replaced by machines, and the entire structure eventually toppled. Including the work that couldn't be done by a machine - it was simply not requested anymore or there wasn't enough people coming from below to fill the ranks.

It's somewhat doubtful whether software engineers will feel the same both, because of the actual impact AI and that the job itself IS automation by nature. There could be political factors, however, that could skew things otherwise.