What Are All the Laid-Off Programmers Going to Do?

Friend of mine recently got hired by a large European defence company. They seem to have plenty of work and are desperate to hire talented developers.

Companies around here (Europe) are still hiring, but the profiles have been changed. You have to offer more than just the latest front-end framework. Domain knowledge and/or broad experience are necessary.

Building websites is for AI, building large enterprisey applications are for humans.

At least for now...

Hopefully a few of 'em can transition to teaching HS. If only to be in-your-face counterexamples for too-optimistic children & families - who really want to believe that "computers" is some magic cornucopia of endless high-paying jobs.

The historical answer is cybercrime.

Would this be happening if industry was forced to pay for the real cost to society of the AI that is replacing the programmers? Just the subsidized resource use alone, accompanied by its associated carbon load, is staggering. Add the massive theft of IP and personal data used to train the models, as well as the underpaid Third World "moderator" labor involved in cleaning up all that scraped data, and you get the picture. All those laid off programmers would be a bargain in comparison, and their compensation would contribute to a more vibrant and equitable economy.

I'm all for letting the market decide these things, so long as costs aren't socialized, especially as blatantly as is happening in the case of AI.