Programming will always be important, it will never not be important. There will always be a point in time where someone needs to know how the sausage is made.

Programming will always be important, it will never not be important. There will always be a point in time where someone needs to know how the sausage is made. We still have people who need to know how the silicon functions, we still need people to synthesize the silicon primitives into something that can interpret assembly. We need people to write the translation layer between high level code and assembly. We need people working on the API that interacts with all the various hardware. How do you think AI/ML systems will be troubleshot without people who understand how they are made? Software is the process of creating and synthesizing abstractions. If you define programming as a specialty primarily concerned about the language/science/math of abstraction it will never go away. The layer of abstraction will change, but the labour of abstraction will always be there. Even if you believe that AI will surpass us and will be able to invent and realize complex systems, that creates an existential threat to biological life, that type of battle would be fought with programmers. Even if you think we could program safety measures, gamma rays pelt the earth flipping bits on computer systems across the planet. Microsoft can detect solar activity by the number of crash reports they get. What happens when the wrong bit gets flipped? What happens when the wrong machine gets too hot? I think the question you're asking might be closer to "What do you think the graph of aggregate %time spent on domain specific business logic over time looks like?" I don't think writing software will be fundamentally different in my life time, faster as we codify more abstractions, but not different.