Re: Compensation expectations, I figured out a long time ago that bad programmers create bad code, and bad code creates work for good programmers.
If the amount of bad code is no longer limited by the availability of workers who can be trained up to "just below average" and instead anyone who knows how to work a touchscreen can make AI slop, this opens up a big economic opportunity.
One could hope, but in my view perception precedes reality and even if that is the reality the perception is that AI will lower compensation demands and those doing the layoffs/hiring will act accordingly.
You could also make the same claims about outsourcing, and while it appears that in most cases the outsourcing doesn't pay off, the perception that it would has really damaged CS as a career.
And like with outsourcing it starts with the jobs at the lower end of the skill range in an industry, and so people at the higher end don't worry about it, and later it expands and they learn that they too are not safe.
What happened a couple of decades ago in poetry [1] could happen now with programming:
> No longer is it just advertising jingles and limericks made in Haiti and Indonesia. It's quatrains, sonnets, and free-form verse being "outsourced" to India, the Philippines, Russia, and China.
...
> "Limericks are a small slice of the economy, and when people saw globalization creating instability there, a lot said, 'It's not my problem,'" says Karl Givens, an economist at Washington's Economic Policy Institute. "Now even those who work in iambic pentameter are feeling it."
If the amount of bad code is no longer limited by the availability of workers who can be trained up to "just below average" and instead anyone who knows how to work a touchscreen can make AI slop, this opens up a big economic opportunity.