I think what will happen is what happened to hardware. You used to come across people who could do things like solder components to a board and hook up various

I think what will happen is what happened to hardware. You used to come across people who could do things like solder components to a board and hook up various ICs as well. Heck, I did this at uni. Now that layer of craftsmen is gone. You are either an uber-expert in how computer hardware works, or you just buy the hardware and treat it like a kind of magic. Traditionally to become an expert you went through an intermediate stage, showed your interest, and got trained. Your hobby could turn into a profession, since the step up was gentle and interested people were needed to do some of the supporting work. Nowadays if you're going to work in a chip fab, it's not because you were a soldering iron kid. You go through a quite long academic process that doesn't really recruit from the ranks of the hobbyists, though of course you'd expect there to be some natural interest. But the jump isn't gentle, you end up learning some pretty advanced things that make soldering seem like the stone age. Software has this layer of craftsmen still, though it is rapidly dying, and not just from LLMs. There's a enormous number of people who can more or less hook up a website and make it work, without knowing everything about how exactly it does that. There's also plenty of excel people and python scripting people who use code in their day-to-day, but can't tell you advanced concepts. There's a lot of modern services that make this sort of thing easier (wordpress etc), and this level of skill is very learnable by people in the developing world. It's not like you can't become a real expert in those parts of the world, but economically it makes sense that there are a lot of intermediately skilled there. What will happen with GPT and the like is the experts will not need as much help from the juniors. If you're a software architect in charge of a whole system, you won't just sketch out the skeleton of the system and then farm out the little tasks to junior coders. Maybe there are pieces that you'd farm out, but you will definitely save on the number of juniors because an LLM will give you what you need. The result being that we'll get fewer people trained to the highest levels, but those who are will be much more productive. So those guys will indeed be entering the quantum age, but it strands a lot of people.