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The perils of being a knowledge worker
- hackinthebochs 13y agoYou always see programmers act smug regarding the fact that our job is somehow protected from the coming automation revolution. After all, all those processes will need programmers, right? I think this is very short-sighted thinking. I've come to realize that about 90% of what I do as a web developer is in fact a very mechanical process: take the specification in English, find the appropriate APIs and wire up the data flow such that the result matches the specification. The only part of this process that machines couldn't do better than me at this point is understand the specification. I envision a system (in the surprisingly near future) where anyone could simply tell a computer what they want done and it will churn out "solutions" to the specification until the user whittles them down into exactly what they want. I don't think this would take any great leaps of technology either, besides a passable NLP system. This is already the main roadblock towards automating white collar jobs where 95% of it is performed on a computer. It may turn out that our jobs will be the first ones to evaporate.
- DanBC 13y agoAnd don't forget that for all the stuff that can't be replaced by computer-software-writing-robots we'll have low cost Chinese / Indian / whatever.