I guess you aren't a developer or you aren't using ChatGPT or Copilot to code if so. The difference between 500 contractors in Bangalore and Copilot is that AI turnover is much, much quicker to obtain and review. For those who don't program the usual development cycle when having contractors is that you tell them to do something, they estimate a time like 2 hours or 4 days after which they upload a PR (or pull request) to a branch in the repository, that PR is reviewed by an in-house developer and either is accepted and merged or rejected with a comment to fix either a possible bug or style. That contractor might be working for three different companies each with a different style guide so he might be mixing them (like using all uppercase names for constants instead of using CamelCase, or returning by reference instead of returning tuples when returning multiple values, etc. They also might create helper methods that already exist but they have never used before leading to code repetition, some of which might not even be caught by the in-house reviewer (which adds the possibility of bugs because you modify one method thinking it's the one being used everywhere but it turns out there was an almost exact copy being used somewhere else).
Copilot parses the whole trunk and understands immediately the style guide. So when you request something it outputs code that "looks" OK in a matter of seconds. It's your task to review and check, but it minimizes many instances of mistakes. For example, it knows there are already helper methods that it can call instead of building its owns, it can write and modify testing code so that you can upload the PR with tests covering the modifications, if you find something that's looks sketchy you can request a change and it will "fix" it immediately.
Of course, all these systems are still experimental and not perfect so the reviewer needs to be careful when accepting code (which is why I used some double quotes around) but it's not different from reviewing code written in Bangalore except that the changes you request are done immediately while you are "in the flow".
What does this mean for the software industry? Well, for starters junior positions will be scaled down, and it will be harder to enter the industry because many of the tasks you brought juniors in for are now done immediately and with a better quality by these tools (something mentioned in a video by Nick Chapsas, wish I could find the link again). What about those who are already in the industry? Well, there are jobs that will be cut undoubtedly, the software industry has a lot of redundancy and if there's something programmers hate is order and timetables (which is why programmers don't like project managers or scrum masters or whoever is taking the managing position). Is anyone safe at all? Of course, you cannot ask ChatGPT "write me a Red Dead Redemption 3 game" just as you cannot ask it to build you a bank or healthcare system. If you ask me the ones that will stick around are those who adopt these tools and exploit them to the maximum. I don't know anyone who is still punching cards at work or writing code in
ed one line at a time, nor people coding without an IDE (I, and guess many, sometimes do because it's faster to edit a single file to modify a single line using vim than launching Visual Studio 2022, but it's not the norm).
Does this mean we will be getting two FIFA or two NBA or two annual games per year now because development times are faster? Not really, it doesn't make sense for companies to release faster iterations of the same game just because your developers are now 50% more productive. However it will mean that games will have more time of testing (which is an area that has always been considered an afterthought until books like Software Testing Techniques by Boris Beizer and The Art of Software Testing by Myers in the late 70s/early 80s were published) and that there shouldn't be buggy releases like Cyberpunk or similar.
Again, I think gamers are being more Catholics than the Pope, finding a problem where developers themselves find a solution. In the end, why should gamers care whether the game is using Unity or Unreal, if the game is coded in C# or C++, if it has a code coverage of 35% or 80%, etc. 70% of developers approve of AI usage, why gamers think it's bad for the industry?