These discussions usually conflate "programming, a viable career option" with "programming, an intellectual human endeavor". The viable career option will, IMO

These discussions usually conflate "programming, a viable career option" with "programming, an intellectual human endeavor". The viable career option will, IMO, unquestionably vanish for the majority. Manufacturing and working at McDonalds were once seen as a viable career path. They've been streamlined and automated such that it requires only a fraction of the human labor it did a generation ago. Google and the like will make this happen for computing as well. We'll only need so many Evernote like apps. I'd wager we'll have reduced GUI interaction in general, such that a lot of JS/HTML/CSS, and similar coding work will be gone. We're abstracting things into higher level languages. TODAY I can, with my voice alone, tell my phone to perform a truly fascinating amount of work compared to a decade ago. When programming as a career is reduced to filling out text files in something like YAML and having ML go to work, only the bleeding edge, the mathiest of the mathheads, will have skills to command a living wage.