While a agree to some extent and have even explored the idea of how my programming skills could be augmented with other non-programming jobs I still feel that for the foreseeable future we will have programmers.
I see lots of jobs being done by non-programmers that would be done much much better had that person been a programmer. The future will undoubtedly be full of people in traditionally non-programming jobs with programming skills. But we should not trivialize the systems that allow this to happen. While most programmers work very high in the stack there are many very deep layers that sit below that will require a army of programmers to keep going and keep innovating so more productivity can be had at the higher layers.
As an example I feel people often trivialize one or two liners programs, or short examples that seem to do so much for such a few terms. But even those simple examples are backed by sometimes 10 of thousands of lines of codes. A wave of a hand, and a bark of spoken command to a computer will -- at least with today's software and hardware -- never end up producing something new and innovated that will be widely used.
To get where you are suggesting many things have to change. And it's not all software. If you even take a cursory glance at what it takes today to bootstrap a operating system -- you would then see how complicated things get. For the future I feel you are envisioning the hardware will have to be worked along with software to make things much much much more modular than they are. More standardised terms to describe things and more finite building blocks will need to be made. In fact the closest thing I could get your future vision with today's technology is FPGAs and it is no trivial task to do anything useful with a hardware described language.
tl;dr We have not solved computers or software, therefor; a army of programmers will be required for the foreseeable future.
I don't think that day is as far off as you seem to. Yes, there are some kinds of programming which require deep expertise in programming itself, but these jobs are far from the majority.
If you've ever read Vinge's _Deepness in the Sky_, recall that the protagonists occupation for a period of time was that of a code archeologist, attempting to collect, categorize, and understand code that was centuries (or was it millenia?) old... We may be a ways off from that, but I don't think its far from the truth of the future.
I see lots of jobs being done by non-programmers that would be done much much better had that person been a programmer. The future will undoubtedly be full of people in traditionally non-programming jobs with programming skills. But we should not trivialize the systems that allow this to happen. While most programmers work very high in the stack there are many very deep layers that sit below that will require a army of programmers to keep going and keep innovating so more productivity can be had at the higher layers.
As an example I feel people often trivialize one or two liners programs, or short examples that seem to do so much for such a few terms. But even those simple examples are backed by sometimes 10 of thousands of lines of codes. A wave of a hand, and a bark of spoken command to a computer will -- at least with today's software and hardware -- never end up producing something new and innovated that will be widely used.
To get where you are suggesting many things have to change. And it's not all software. If you even take a cursory glance at what it takes today to bootstrap a operating system -- you would then see how complicated things get. For the future I feel you are envisioning the hardware will have to be worked along with software to make things much much much more modular than they are. More standardised terms to describe things and more finite building blocks will need to be made. In fact the closest thing I could get your future vision with today's technology is FPGAs and it is no trivial task to do anything useful with a hardware described language.
tl;dr We have not solved computers or software, therefor; a army of programmers will be required for the foreseeable future.