

The perils of being a knowledge worker - gandalfgeek
http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/56222096673/the-perils-of-being-a-knowledge-worker

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hackinthebochs
You 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
And 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.

