I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.
I think your numbers are off. TAM for office workers is ~20T a year, of which SWE compensation is ~3T. So if they can make 3T x 10% X 5 years = 1.5T that covers their current valuations. It's not as insane as you make out, even not taking into account the other high risk areas like legal, accounting etc
Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.
I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.
That's how human progress works. No one can want or need it because they cannot conceptualize wanting it until someone shows that it is possible. Now, many of those wants become needs.