Inexpensive is a relative indirect term. Can you clarify what you mean here?
The expense of an LLM prompt is cents, the expense of a entry-level programmer is at least 50k/yr.
Why would this be?
Its simple economics.
There are firm requirements on both parties (employer/employee) in any given profession in an economy. You must make profit above what it costs you to survive.
That puts a floor on the labor costs involved for every profession. If these costs fall below that floor in purchasing power, no potential entrants who are competent will enter that market. There is no economic benefit in doing so, given the opportunity cost. Worse, severe competition for jobs will also force the most competent out first (brain drain).
You not only are losing people going into the pipeline, you are losing the mid-senior level people to burnout and this brain drain as well from adverse competition from the job pool shrinking to such a degree. AI effectively eliminates capital formation (through time value of labor going to zero), which breaks the foundations of every market economy over the past thousand years or so. We have no suitable replacement, and we depend on production remaining at current yields to support our population level (food).
What happened to the advanced vacuum tube engineers after transistors were miniaturized? A lot of those processes, and techniques became lost knowledge. The engineers that specialized retired, didn't pass that knowledge on because there was no economic benefit in doing so.
White collar jobs account for ~60% of the economy, and will be replaced by AI.
We've only seen a small percentage of the economy impacted so far, and its created chaotic whipsaws.
What happens when those single digit percentage disruptions become over half?
I mean literally that if you're a green-eyeshade bean-counting manager and you're making a headcount decision and you have the option of retaining a very senior engineer or hiring an early-career engineer, and there's a story you can tell yourself where they both get the same fundamental revenue-generating or cost-avoiding work done (for instance: because the senior engineer has a later-career focus in team building and acceleration, which has become less relevant in this stipulated world where we're laying off tons of engineers --- that's the premise of the question, not what I believe is happening) then there's a lot of reason to believe it's the senior engineer who is going to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
I think a lot of senior people talking about the impacts of this technology on "junior developers" understand this, and are trying to talk their own book.
