There’s a lot to be said about dismissive neoliberal takes on “disruption“ but this whole idea that every profession can just transition to code if the bottom drops out is particularly ridiculous.
Ignoring all questions of transferrable skills etc, the plain truth is that software development employs a small fraction of the number of people that manufacturing did, service does.
Although it’s not precise, there are about 4M software development jobs in the US today. Over the past 20 years, the US manufacturing industry lost 5M jobs. JC Penney alone had 90K or so employees; that’s (conservatively) more devs than all of Alphabet’s subsidiaries employs.
Software is HOT HOT HOT because it eliminates the need for people. Even if the industry was in a position to train, integrate, and absorb hundreds of thousands, millions of new people on short notice their most likely work would be automating away other peoples’ jobs
It doesn’t even do an acceptable job of replacing humans in many cases, but it’s still lucrative. The point is that “disruption” is all well and good at the macro level because human lives don’t matter at the macro level. They’re just noise.
A system or proposal that treats tech disruption as a neutral force for positive evolution, but doesn’t account for the real lives of people who are disrupted, is murder by negligence.