We've been waiting for "knowledge bank" type of jobs to be replaced by AI any year now since the expert systems of the 1980's. But I feel like this kind of thin

We've been waiting for "knowledge bank" type of jobs to be replaced by AI any year now since the expert systems of the 1980's. But I feel like this kind of thinking reveals an ignorance of these professions. Optometrists do a lot more than just "measuring your prescription", they also deal with eye health and the peculiarities and variations that come with biological systems. But even when it comes to your prescription, what an optometrist does is deal with the subjective nature of your experience and that's something that's difficult for an AI to do today (or probably for a good while yet). I think there's something very insightful in your post though, and that is the observation that programmers will just work one abstraction layer up. In general, it has been demonstrated that a combination of expert + AI is far more effective than either one on their own. I can see AI becoming an indispensable tool in the tool belt of an expert, and since we want the best possible outcomes, we're not going to throw the expert out of that equation any time soon. What we may see is the need for fewer experts to get the job done, as the automation capabilities of AI allow them to become more efficient. Just like the power loom, it certainly reduced the number of humans needed, but even today, you still need some people to service the machines and to program their patterns.