That's not a given, seeing how the software people have access to is often specifically made to prevent people from wanting, or even realizing, that it could be changed. I'm thinking of iPhones, but also about what motivated me to start programming: games. Nowadays, consoles are the epitome of DRM, and many PC games are following on that path.
Unless open source catches on soon, I am afraid only smaller and smaller proportion of humanity will be programmers, even without the compounding effect of the general population constantly increasing and diluting the existing programmer pool.
You mean when it goes from .001% of the population to .002% of the population? I don't think there will be any time that a large fraction of the world's population knows how to program. I've even tried to get my own kids interested in learning how to program to no avail. Some of my kids don't have the aptitude for it, but those who do have the aptitude just aren't interested.
Think about how many people know how to use SQL or Excel functions. While the number of people knowledgable about writing C++ or Java won't reach this high of a level, there will be tools that are widely understood that enable people to build pieces of technology as needed beyond what is available now.
I have literally heard this rhetoric for the 20 years I've been paying attention to this and I still haven't seen anything even approximating these grand promises. Software Development is a difficult field and expecting a big crowd to suddenly adopt it and start producing valuable content is not reasonable.
That's just not true, the thing to note is that no software engineers have been displaced to date in any clear way as a result of new tools.
In the same exact way that software engineers are able to do far more complex work through the use of third party APIs, business users use increasingly more complex technology to augment their work. This ranges from sales and marketing tools, to legal research tools, to medical analysis tools.
These tools generally speak in some amount of programatic language as well, which is why my point remains accurate.
