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I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Mar

I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers themselves? If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate. I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour, farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes, why is that?

asadotzler 13y ago
I agree with you. I also like to think that we have replaced, several times over, the original "programmers" with smarter and smarter silicon and the result is not fewer programmers, but orders of magnitude more. I think this will happen with other professions. Things which once required years of education and (often physical) practice, say delivering certain kinds of healthcare, will become heavily computer and robot assisted and we'll see some of them pushed from the expensive limited availability hospital to the much more widely available pharmacy -- or even to the shopping mall.
- ams6110 13y ago
  Interesting point... you're saying that we might end up with more doctors and lawyers, because with the assistance of technology, anyone can be one?
georgemcbay 13y ago
I'm not the OP you are responding to, but: 1) I do think software engineers are in danger of suffering the same fate, just later than some. We won't even be the last profession to go, that'll be comedians probably. 2) People often underestimate the impact of automation by looking at automation as a binary state where the problem comes when you automate away everyone, but that's not a great way to look at it. Partial automation on a quick enough timeline is more than enough to destabilize the economy of a particular industry. We are a long way from computers replacing all lawyers or doctors or software engineers, but if they can replace just 25% of them by allowing the remaining 75% to be as productive as the entire 100% was previously, that's already a large economic impact. If automation can replace 75% of them, that's a massive world-altering shift, economically. We really should be worrying about the economic impact of all this automation now, because at least in the USA (where I live) we are a very long way away from (sociopolitically) being able to deal with this quickly approaching new reality of having way more people than are needed for doing what would traditionally be considered "productive" work.
VLM 13y ago
"why you can't replace programmers" Oh I'd disagree with that... If you'd like an example, note how "Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system. Its buzzword compliant, being NoSQL, and scales to tens of thousands of records, which despite claims to the contrary is almost always enough for most real world problems. The world of the future is not having a DBA and CRUD developer cooperate to write your shopping list, its one untrained dude with a spreadsheet. Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by one marketing guy with photoshop. Its already happened. Its not bravado but observation. Rows and rows of desks of junior accountants replaced by one accountant with quickbooks. Another observation, not bravado. And what, exactly, are pharmacists doing 99% of the time beyond being a very high item value / high risk vending machine? Realizing my mom worked as a pharm-tech part time when I was a kid, so you're not going to fool me... Very highly priced customer service and team lead and thats about it. The mechanical steam shovel never quite eliminated the use or sales of hand shovels. Its just that "digging ditches" isn't a viable career path anymore for almost anyone, anymore. Or "manual metal lathe operator" or any number of other tasks. I'm not saying there will never be another accountant hired or dr. or lawyer. Just a whole heck of a lot less of them. At least one, two, maybe three orders of magnitude fewer. Much like the first industrial revolution... there's people right now, out there, being paid to use a hand shovel... the story is, its now probably hundreds of people right at this moment, not 5% of the population or whatever like in 1850.
- ams6110 13y ago
  The examples you cite are all enabled by A, cheap, powerful hardware; and B, software which is feasible because of A. But the actual process of building software, a developer sitting at a keyboard, writing code line-by-line, has not really advanced since we moved away from plugboards, or at least since the advent of high level languages. The tools have gotten incrementally better, and are more accessible to more people, but this is all because cheaper, faster hardware made it possible, not because of any exponential leaps in the process of building software. We haven't gotten rid of hand shovels in this case, we've just made them much cheaper and much more efficient, supporting a larger, not a smaller number of hand-shovel workers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard

asadotzler 13y ago

I agree with you. I also like to think that we have replaced, several times over, the original "programmers" with smarter and smarter silicon and the result is not fewer programmers, but orders of magnitude more. I think this will happen with other professions. Things which once required years of education and (often physical) practice, say delivering certain kinds of healthcare, will become heavily computer and robot assisted and we'll see some of them pushed from the expensive limited availability hospital to the much more widely available pharmacy -- or even to the shopping mall.

ams6110 13y ago
Interesting point... you're saying that we might end up with more doctors and lawyers, because with the assistance of technology, anyone can be one?

georgemcbay 13y ago

I'm not the OP you are responding to, but: 1) I do think software engineers are in danger of suffering the same fate, just later than some. We won't even be the last profession to go, that'll be comedians probably. 2) People often underestimate the impact of automation by looking at automation as a binary state where the problem comes when you automate away everyone, but that's not a great way to look at it. Partial automation on a quick enough timeline is more than enough to destabilize the economy of a particular industry. We are a long way from computers replacing all lawyers or doctors or software engineers, but if they can replace just 25% of them by allowing the remaining 75% to be as productive as the entire 100% was previously, that's already a large economic impact. If automation can replace 75% of them, that's a massive world-altering shift, economically. We really should be worrying about the economic impact of all this automation now, because at least in the USA (where I live) we are a very long way away from (sociopolitically) being able to deal with this quickly approaching new reality of having way more people than are needed for doing what would traditionally be considered "productive" work.

VLM 13y ago

"why you can't replace programmers" Oh I'd disagree with that... If you'd like an example, note how "Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system. Its buzzword compliant, being NoSQL, and scales to tens of thousands of records, which despite claims to the contrary is almost always enough for most real world problems. The world of the future is not having a DBA and CRUD developer cooperate to write your shopping list, its one untrained dude with a spreadsheet. Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by one marketing guy with photoshop. Its already happened. Its not bravado but observation. Rows and rows of desks of junior accountants replaced by one accountant with quickbooks. Another observation, not bravado. And what, exactly, are pharmacists doing 99% of the time beyond being a very high item value / high risk vending machine? Realizing my mom worked as a pharm-tech part time when I was a kid, so you're not going to fool me... Very highly priced customer service and team lead and thats about it. The mechanical steam shovel never quite eliminated the use or sales of hand shovels. Its just that "digging ditches" isn't a viable career path anymore for almost anyone, anymore. Or "manual metal lathe operator" or any number of other tasks. I'm not saying there will never be another accountant hired or dr. or lawyer. Just a whole heck of a lot less of them. At least one, two, maybe three orders of magnitude fewer. Much like the first industrial revolution... there's people right now, out there, being paid to use a hand shovel... the story is, its now probably hundreds of people right at this moment, not 5% of the population or whatever like in 1850.

ams6110 13y ago
The examples you cite are all enabled by A, cheap, powerful hardware; and B, software which is feasible because of A. But the actual process of building software, a developer sitting at a keyboard, writing code line-by-line, has not really advanced since we moved away from plugboards, or at least since the advent of high level languages. The tools have gotten incrementally better, and are more accessible to more people, but this is all because cheaper, faster hardware made it possible, not because of any exponential leaps in the process of building software. We haven't gotten rid of hand shovels in this case, we've just made them much cheaper and much more efficient, supporting a larger, not a smaller number of hand-shovel workers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugboard