This would be the contrarian perspective, and it's an interesting thought to consider. If memory serves, I think Marc A points out in an old Youtube conference video how most new technologies follow the Promethean myth in their relationship to society.

Funny enough your observation of

> "There are more accountants now than then."

could be extrapolated from in two ways

The optimistic perspective might suppose technological development gives rise to new marketplace adaptations and creation of new and tangential jobs. For example, Facebook / Social Networks / Search creating new roles like: Influencers, Social Media Managers, Search Engine Optimization, et cetera.

For the pessimist perspective, I think you could suppose the "end state" of all technological progress in human societies is, eventually, an oligopoly of two industries: bureaucracy (legal) and politics (marketing).

Companies are there to make money. If the same job currently dinner by 5 people can now be done by 3, and it means more profit for shareholders, what do you think shareholder will want?

While profit is the main driver, it'll mean smaller teams

Not today, not with current tech, maybe in the near future though

Well productivity is up 240% since the 1950s. So due to a single person being more efficient than 2 in 1950 and the 43.5 million workforce we can extrapolate that no more than 20 million workers will be needed nowadays.

Except in 2020 there were 152 million employed americans, with a productivity 2.4x higher than 1950s, or a cummulative workforce of 365 million 1950 americans working. And somehow they all had stuf to do and work on

I dont think that's a fair and direct comparison tbh. There's a lot of new industries now that people have diverged into and population growth has exploded which I hope for the sake of the planet and human kind is going to slow , at least until we're in a better position to manage bigger populations without killing the planet and other life.

I'll be happy if I'm wrong, but are you confident enough to bet that there won't be less need for general developers and engineers and not have a plan in case? Personally I would be looking at my options In case I needed to pivot and not waiting 5o find out.

> There's a lot of new industries now

And if this tech is really revolutionary there won't be new industries? Have we peaked?

> but are you confident enough to bet that there won't be less need for general developers and engineers and not have a plan in case?

I am confident there will not be a lack of work. Whether the roles are similar is a different question. Actuaries and accountants look very different now to before excel was common place. Web developers were not a thing before the internet.

If the revolution comes, and jobs are no longer needed, perhpas there is an industry for prompt engineers. Or model fine tunning experts. Dev ops roles to connect super computers to Modelling APIs. Who knows, but the skills of a decent Engineer are on problem solving, on learning new ideas, on applying problem solving laterally those are such broad skills that is hard for a job market to exist without needing them.

But just like building more roads induces more demand by making driving more attractive, this will lower the cost of custom software development and create new demand. Perhaps one day soon it will be affordable for every company of every size to have a fully custom ERP solution instead of shoehorning their business processes into Salesforce or the like. Perhaps every family will have a custom app managing their household's smart home appliances, childrens' allowances, autonomous vehicles, home maintenance, bill payment, child homework tracking, etc. in an integrated system.

Are you saying don't worry, don't have a fallback plan, everything will be honky dory?