The Onion

I worked as a licensed aircraft mechanic for years, watched my coworkers die from disease and injury, destroyed my body, and did it all for basically no money.

I did a coding bootcamp and and doubled my salary + plus wfh + better benefits.

Blue collar work is exploitation to the highest degree.

Automation has been replacing your job btw, just indirectly. More reliability, better preventative procedures, better chemical engineering, process improvements, and automation of related and dependent fields means that equipment needs less maintenance overall.

Software development jobs are not actually being replaced by 'ai' and the automation has to actually be engineered by someone. In the same way that an llm may be able to naively troubleshoot a problem, it can also naively achieve a programming solution. That's it though, llms arent solving the problems that computer science is solving.

After working on airplanes I worked as an applications developer (and pseudo systems engineer) for an industrial automation company, the physical machines we manufactured completely eradicated jobs, a single bespoke robot cell took what was 30-50 people and replaced it with three people monitoring it. Those 47 people are now in competition with you for your job.

Like you said in your own post, advancements in technology are making your job easier, which in turn lowers the bar of entry and the pay scale with it. Easier and faster work (increased efficiency) means you need less people to do the work.

Too many people think 'automation' is a robot coming in and replacing your job, sometimes that is the case, but more often than not, it's things like digitizing records, excel spreadsheets, process improvements, and micro automation (like tools that can scan and diagnose every trouble code and provide the common troubleshooting paths, instead of needing to watch a flashing pattern and look that pattern up manually in a physical book)

Every job has automation risk, it's just not always clear.