

“Profession” (1957) - nbaksalyar
http://www.inf.ufpr.br/renato/profession.html

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SideburnsOfDoom
Ah, spot the anachronism - the 1950s view of the future 100s of years from
now:

> "Now what’s a Programmer going to be doing? Sitting all day long, feeding
> some fool _mile-long_ machine.”

~~~
IvyMike
What's the combined length of Google's data centers?

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SideburnsOfDoom
That thought had crossed my mind. An individual data center? I don't know,
probably a lot less than a mile. Apparently they vary:
[https://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-
center-...](https://huanliu.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/amazon-data-center-size/)

The whole lot put together, certainly larger than a mile.

Minimum size, in a few hundred years time? Definitely not larger than a mile.

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bootload
_" There are ten thousand men like you, George, who support the advancing
technology of fifteen hundred worlds. We can’t allow ourselves to miss one
recruit to that number or waste our efforts on one member who doesn’t measure
up."_

From Nine Tomorrows, as a final year student I remember reading this line from
the short story prior to exams and relaxing for just a moment.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tomorrows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tomorrows)

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jeorgun
I've always loved this story. Reading it now, though, it's funny that it was
written by the guy most famous for his robot stories. They seem like a pretty
glaring omission. If you could program the job skills and knowledge onto a
human brain, why not a positronic one? All the non-creative jobs would just
end up being automated.

Which is basically the situation we're heading towards now in any case. Pretty
prescient, I suppose.

~~~
darkmighty
Well, it might be cheaper to use a biological brain than to use a computer for
many tasks, even a few centuries into the future. We're incredibly good at
high level abstraction and problem solving. We're pretty flexible: you can
"program" us with a few verbal instructions to do an enormous range of tasks
and we fill in the gaps in the instructions. All that for the low price of
US$10,000! (average cost of financing a human to adult age?)

I of course agree that human soldering is will hardly remain crucial to
manufacturing.

That is, provided we actually needed to compete with robots at all (will
depend on the demographic and resource situation of the future). It's likely
most humans will stick to the most pleasurable tasks and only a few strategic
activities will keep being rewarded for their raw productive value.

In other words, demography and resources equal, we're not really competing
with move advanced tools: they should be just free our time and improving
quality of life, provided we have some adequate scheme for distribution of
resources.

That for me is one of the most interesting aspects to be explored by incoming
changes: how will we manage our economy (among humans), and how will we manage
our relation with machines as they gradually become more proficient at higher
and higher level tasks? Will our definition of 'human' change in the process?

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neelborooah
Such a wonderful story! There is so much emphasis on brilliant execution in
software (and startups), but creativity is not celebrated enough. As with this
story, it's not necessarily bad or good, but it is this way.

"You made this? That's cool bro, but how can we create a business out of it?"

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viach
Sounds stupid, but that's one of the reasons I'm working in software dev.
Thanks, Isaac.

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late2part
Perhaps the story explains why so many people succeed greatly that don't
finish college?

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douche
One of the things I love about Asimov, is that no matter how much of his stuff
I read, there's always something new out there.

~~~
acheron
Indeed. I was initially surprised I hadn't read this one before, but then when
you remember how much he wrote there's no way I've read even a tenth of his
stories. So I really shouldn't be surprised at all.

~~~
shalmanese
Profession and The Feeling of Power [1] always seemed like sister texts to me.
They were written around the same time and explore very similar themes.

[1]
[http://downlode.org/Etext/power.html](http://downlode.org/Etext/power.html)

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siscia
Amazing stories...

I found myself "struggling" in college (3.5 GPA in American, 26/30 in Italian)
and I am surrounded by successful kids that have no answer to the question:
"What you want to do ?" nor I see any effort on them to learn anything other
than what its feed in our young brain...

I am going back to class to regain my humbleness...

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peter_l_downs
I read this maybe last year, but had totally forgotten that it was written by
Asimov. Great writing, thanks for posting this here.

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keeganpoppen
great read. does this story reminds anyone else of The Giver (the highlight of
5th grade's conscripted reading)?

~~~
CosmicShadow
That was what I was thinking too!

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nzealand
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed reading asimov's short stories.

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demircancelebi
This was a great story, thank you for posting it

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bra-ket
super, I read it in Russian when I was a kid

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dieg0
thank you!

