You make an interesting point about abstractions and the march of technology. As technology progresses, difficult and complicated tasks of yesterday become abst

You make an interesting point about abstractions and the march of technology. As technology progresses, difficult and complicated tasks of yesterday become abstracted away and become more accessible to lesser trained people. C followed by Java allows MOST programmers to not bother with understanding assembly, same with web frameworks, and i can see how it would be possible to implement a markup language that generates custom kernels. I can also see how within the next few years, we will certainly have easy to use machine learning libraries (there are already many good ones today) that bring the power of ML systems to programmers not trained in statistics and linear algebra. That makes me wonder what kind of technical skills have long lifetimes, valuable in the real world (as opposed to merely being technically interesting), and are difficult enough to acquire that one doesn't have to worry about competition against a low-paid worker army....