I think AI wins against people when we start using KPIs in an industrial view of software like defects / LOC, decomposability, etc), or possibly even maintainability / understandability of a codebase. Gosh, even since the 1980s expert systems were already out-performing entire doctors' boards in diagnosing issues in patients so clearly technical performance in KPIs isn't the only measure by which we adopt technology in society.
When it comes to judgment calls for technical decisions, a lot of interesting innovations appear to come from rejecting conventions / averages in favor of a different set of constraints as a trade-off because we challenge the assumptions we make about the demands being asked of a solution / product. I'm thinking in the constellation of the apocryphal Steve Jobs quote about rejecting asking horse riders what they want because if we asked them they'd ask for a more reliable horse.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but I believe I'd disagree with your first point on the perceived lower skill roles with higher design / creative requirements. I've seen a lot of the software industry being software factories rather than something closer to craftsmanship or even proper ABET-style engineering and AI is indeed better than the manually written slop that was encouraged in low-creativity / low-innovation environments such as QA and a lot of infrastructure engineering like defining CI pipelines. It seems reminiscent of the waves that hit industries like coal mining and manufacturing in the US except at a much faster rate and with different driving and resisting forces in automation.
Programmer / engineer compensation in the US market at least has been looking bimodal for at least 12 years now and the first one looks even more devastated in terms of labor than the big tech companies based upon (lack of) job postings and from browsing my connections on LinkedIn.
The demand exploded as so many business cases for computing and automation arose partly because the application of them helped suppress job growth in other areas while also attracting investor capital during heavy deregulation / liberalization trends so it's difficult to attribute any change to an effect in isolation. Let's not forget the old myopic sounding quote where someone thought the global market for computers was maybe $50 million or some other laughably small number.
The issue that hasn't been addressed with the latest wave of computing hype is whether enough new jobs for displaced workers can arise during a time when people are experiencing such economic turmoil and political strife where new jobs or other means of letting people find a way to have gainful employment in society when institutions are so weak now and everyone across professions is being worked to an early grave from sheer stress alone. This resembles Japan or Korea although the US and Canada I can't imagine having the same kind of social drivers although many trends from them are showing up in youth demographic trends. And frankly as I see it a large number of current social problems are from the past 50+ years of the decline of blue collar jobs in developed economies being accessible to as many people and the lack of a competition-driven economy as much as an extractive one in most OECD countries.
It's not like he was going to be a Congressional staffer nor working at a newspaper. But if he was on-call for a lot of his career that'd be kind of amusing
This is sounding eerily similar to how the setup for a Cyberpunk TTRPG scenario. "Militech hired mercenaries raid Militech facilities wearing Arasaka uniforms to make it look like Arasaka did it?"
When it comes to judgment calls for technical decisions, a lot of interesting innovations appear to come from rejecting conventions / averages in favor of a different set of constraints as a trade-off because we challenge the assumptions we make about the demands being asked of a solution / product. I'm thinking in the constellation of the apocryphal Steve Jobs quote about rejecting asking horse riders what they want because if we asked them they'd ask for a more reliable horse.