AI and programming jobs: what goes around, comes around

I'm old enough to remember a time when most shops in city centres were independently owned and run. The town I grew up in had a bookshop, a greengrocer, a cheesemonger, a bicycle shop, a butcher, a baker and -- for all I know -- a candlestick maker. The same was true for most towns in Britain. Each of these town-centre shops was run by a family; often same families for generations.

None of these shops remain. If they've not been absorbed into huge national chains and franchises, they're just shuttered.

Of course, the owners of independent shops blamed the innovations (for that time) of supermarkets and shopping malls. These places sold everything, all in the same place, so they benefited from economies of scale, as well as the funding to build large premises with car parks. Once most people could afford a car, the days of local, independent shops were numbered.

I've recently found myself listening to radio interviews with supermarket executives. It seems that some supermarkets and malls have now started to fall on hard times. At least, they're complaining about reduced profitability. It's hardly surprising: why would anybody make a journey to an out-of-town mall, to pay more money for something they could buy online and have delivered next day?

Am I sympathetic? Can you hear me playing the worlds tiniest violin?

Supermarket executives are complaining because Amazon, et al., are doing to the supermarkets exactly what the supermarkets did to independent shops fifty years ago. Back in the 70s and 80s, supermarket bosses justified the damage that they knew they'd do to local economies and employment with platitudes like "jobs won't go away -- they'll just change".

What has this to do with AI, you ask?

Well, I spent most of my working life in the IT industry, usually as a programmer of some kind. While I saw IT mostly as a source of lucrative employment -- and indoors, with no heavy lifting -- the reason IT has become so important is specifically because it takes away jobs.

That's the whole purpose of automation: to use machines so we can employ less labour. IT executives offered the same platitudes as everybody else who profits by taking away jobs: "jobs won't go away -- they'll just change". I can't avoid the saddening fact that my gain -- my healthy salary and regular bonuses -- came at the expense of somebody else's loss.

Of course, I didn't personally take away other people's jobs -- I wasn't important enough for that. The people who work in Tesco didn't personally take away the livelihoods of independent grocers either -- but they did nothing to prevent this happening.

Now skilled programmers are complaining that AI is taking away their jobs. A career in software engineering no longer looks as appealing, or as long-term, as it once did. The AI companies respond -- well, I don't need to tell you, because it's the same response as always.

I understand why programmers are concerned about this -- of course I do. But we have no moral high-ground to stand on. AI will do to us what we did to the millions of semi-skilled workers whose jobs we helped automate out of existence. Maybe some of us will be able to get semi-skilled work, feeding the Internet into the insatiable maws of LLMs.

What goes around, comes around.

Published 2026-03-15, updated 2026-03-15

AI and programming jobs: what goes around, comes around

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