Retail store clerk was a medium skill/medium prestige job up through the 1970's and 1980's. You needed someone who knew all of the prices for their part of the store (to prevent tag switching), who could recognize what was the expensive dress versus the cheap dress, and remembered all of the prices so they could work quickly without having to look things up (1). There would be stories of retail clerks rising up to CEO, and even if you weren't that ambitious it was a career path that could provide a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Then the laser/upc system came in and hallowed out the career path. UPC codes could be printed in a more permanent way (don't need to put 10c stickers on every orange) and then it was just a DB lookup to get the current price. And there was a natural language description that the register printed so you could do a quick confirmation.
This quickly hallowed out and destroyed the career path: once the laser/UPC/database system meant that almost anyone could be an okay retail clerk with very little training, companies quickly stopped caring about getting anyone above that level, experience no longer mattered- or was rewarded with pay increases, and it created the so-called "McJob" of the 1990s.
Karl Marx had actually written about this all the way back in the 19th Century, this was the alienation of labor, the use of capital investment to replace skilled labor with interchangeable repetition that kept people from feeling satisfaction or success at their jobs- and the pay and career satisfaction of retail clerks in 1990s America followed almost exactly the path of skilled weavers being replaced by machines in 19th Century Birmingham.
Will that happen with SWE? I don't know. But it is a thing that preys on my mind late at night when I'm trying to sleep.