It's not even sure it will reduce the workforce for all of the aforementioned jobs: it's making the same amount of work cost less so it can also increase the demand for the said work to the point it is actually increasing the amount of workers. Like how github and npm increased the developers' productivity so much it drove the developer market up.
Most jobs have a limited demand. Because internal jobs are not the same as products in the marketplace.
Products and services typically require a mix of many kinds of internal parts or tasks to be created or supplied. Most of them are not the majority cost drivers.
You don’t increase the amount of software created by responding to cheaper documentation by increasing the documentation to keep your staff busy, or hiring more document staff, to create even more of the cheaper documentation.
You hire fewer documentation people and shift resources elsewhere.
Making one tasks easier is more likely to reduce internal demand for employees in that area. Very unlikely to somehow increase demand for it.
Unless all tasks get cheaper, or the task is a majority cost driver, and directly spills into obviously lower prices for customers for the product or service.
For the record, labor is around 2/3 of the cost of the product you consume, in any developed economy. And it's not just manufacturing labor (which is a small fraction of that), but all labor. Labor costs have real impact on the price (and then quantity) of product being sold, all over the board.
> Making one tasks easier is more likely to reduce internal demand for employees in that area. Very unlikely to somehow increase demand for it.
And yet we have way more software developers now that you can just use open-source libraries everywhere instead of re-inventing the wheel in a proprietary way every time. This has caused an increased in developer productivity that dwarf any other productivity improvements in other sectors, and yet the number of developers increased.
An increase in developer productivity implies fewer developers per task.
But I agree, that is likely to increase demand for developers in many organizations and the market at large. Since software is a bottleneck on many internal and external products and services, and often is the product or service.
But many other kinds of work are more likely to see a reduction in labor demand, given higher productivity.
But AI software generation will get better, and at some point, lower level coders will not be in demand and that might be a majority. I imagine developer quality and development tasks as a pyramid. The bottom is most vulnerable.
