I strongly disagree. First, you assume that AI will remain less proficient than humans, and therefore suitable only for grunt work. Artificial intelligence has

I strongly disagree. First, you assume that AI will remain less proficient than humans, and therefore suitable only for grunt work. Artificial intelligence has many advantages over us, and this is often overlooked. - How much time does it take to train one software engineer? decades worth of time. Once you have one, what does it get another? about the same amount of time and money. In contrast, once you train one AI based engineer, the time to get the second one is about the time of serializing the state of one and deploying it multiple times. You could recruit and discard AI engineers on demand for whatever you need. - They won't sleep, take breaks for lunch or coffee, get distracted, waste time talking about their car, vacations, wine tasting and other stupid things. They will just work. 24 hours a day. No breaks. - They won't consume information at a rate of 200 to 1000 words per minute, they won't be limited by their visual field, or how fast can they type. They may not even communicate using words, just transfer thoughts directly among them, or even entire trained neural ensembles. Plus, once they learn something that may affect they collectively rather than individually. - They will be aggressively supervised, ranked. Then, since their generations are shorter, this will cause them to continuously improve at a much faster pace than humans. If this happens, the need for having the same amount of human engineers will be lower if not zero. Some people may argue that the human brain has billions of neurons and synaptic connections. Sure. But which portion of that is actively used in developing software? remove motor functions, autonomous functions like regulating heart rate, respiration and such and you are left with much less.