Several developers suggested, in fact, that the number of software jobs might actually grow. An untold number of small firms around the country would love to have their own custom-made software, but were never big enough to hire, say, a five-person programmer team necessary to produce it. But if you could hire a single A.I.-assisted coder to do that same work, or even a part-time one? This is, as Brynjolfsson notes, a version of the “Jevons paradox”: When something gets cheaper to do, we don’t just pocket the savings — we do more of it. Though it could also be that these software jobs won’t pay as well as in the past, because, of course, the jobs aren’t as hard as they used to be. Acquiring the skills isn’t as challenging.
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How things will shake out for professional coders themselves isn’t yet clear. But their mix of exhilaration and anxiety may be a preview for workers in other fields. Anywhere a job involves language and information, this new combination of skills — part rhetoric, part systems thinking, part skepticism about a bot’s output — may become the fabric of white-collar work. Skills that seemed the most technical and forbidding can turn out to be the ones most easily automated. Social and imaginative ones come to the fore. We will produce fewer first drafts and do more judging, while perhaps feeling uneasy about how well we can still judge. Abstraction may be coming for us all.
