I do believe on a macro level there will be more software engineering jobs in the short term (which is not contradictory to software engineers being laid off from some companies as part of AI workforce reshuffling among companies).
However there are at least 3 tipping points in the medium term that can alter this dynamics:
- AI becoming more capable and cost-effective than human in most aspects of software engineering. This would dramatically shift the ROI calculations and tip towards AI over human.
- We reach a stage where software resources and products are abundant, they solve most of our problems, and we don't need more software anymore. Sort of like WALL-E. Obviously we don't need so many software engineers then.
- AI systems take over software systems as the backbone of our technology layer, where AI is cheaper and more capable than software. Maybe we only need 100 different AI systems instead of 100k software systems. At this stage, we are going to be replacing software with AI, so we need less software engineers.
However there are at least 3 tipping points in the medium term that can alter this dynamics:
- AI becoming more capable and cost-effective than human in most aspects of software engineering. This would dramatically shift the ROI calculations and tip towards AI over human.
- We reach a stage where software resources and products are abundant, they solve most of our problems, and we don't need more software anymore. Sort of like WALL-E. Obviously we don't need so many software engineers then.
- AI systems take over software systems as the backbone of our technology layer, where AI is cheaper and more capable than software. Maybe we only need 100 different AI systems instead of 100k software systems. At this stage, we are going to be replacing software with AI, so we need less software engineers.