“Profession” (1957)
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> "Now what’s a Programmer going to be doing? Sitting all day long, feeding some fool mile-long machine.”
The whole lot put together, certainly larger than a mile.
Minimum size, in a few hundred years time? Definitely not larger than a mile.
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.
Which is basically the situation we're heading towards now in any case. Pretty prescient, I suppose.
I find it possible that they are, and that the work done by the non-elite is largely unused in practical applications, but they're still encouraged to do it for two reasons: (1) it gives them something to do, and (2) the competitions (Olympics) give a model for elite human performance that the upper-class technicians and academics then automate.
While it's not strictly answered as to why these competitions are called "Olympics", the general sense of sport is an activity from a previous time. We don't need archers to defend castles or hunt boars, or runners to carry messages at 8 miles per hour when we have cell phones, but there's something innate about the sports that makes us enjoy partaking and (for some) competing and spectating.
The activity of the other 99.999% isn't needed on the front lines, but it's important for keeping human skills and knowledge sharp and so the 0.001% (assuming that the reveal at the end is a reliable source, and it may or may not be) who can be original thinkers have some basis for what to improve and what behaviors the machines need to replicate.
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?
It's why most of their technology seems like it was invented in the 1950's, even though the story is set 4500 years in the future.
"You made this? That's cool bro, but how can we create a business out of it?"
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...