Quartz: "How the Internet is making us poor."

qz.com

6 pointsSCAQTony2 comments

This quote from Marc Andreessen says it all “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.

What about when we start needing fewer people to tell the computers what to do? This is already happening with automated testing and QA, self-reproducing code, etc. Someone mused in response to the XKCD StackSort comic that you could probably build anything just by putting together random code on StackOverflow and integration testing the results. What happens to the 'tell the computers' jobs then?

I ask myself: As technologists, do we have an obligation to understand the ramifications - macroeconomic, sociological and personal - of our work's disruption?

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