Industrial Revolution v.4.0

[airiefairie]

Something big seems to be coming up. Is it possible that we are at the threshold of a technological revolution that would entirely overhaul the way we live, work and communicate? Many experts and analysts believe that this is indeed the case. To such an extent that the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution has become one of the key topics of the

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[garote]

From the linked article:

"... Basically, the system allows a user to drag-and-drop “virtual assembly lines” into place, and run them from a dashboard. ... But could iCEO manage actual work projects for our organization? After a few practice runs, we were ready to find out. For one task, we programmed iCEO to oversee the preparation of a 124-page research report ..."

Every couple of months, somewhere on the planet, some acolyte programmer or frustrated employer of programmers comes up with the bright idea that they could solve the problem of software development once and for all if they just built a set of software tools that management could use on their own, to describe their needs to the computer and have the computer do the work.

In the 60's it often looked like a telephone wiring panel. In the 70's the popular designs involved physical cards or cartridges that you could move around. In the 80's it was rudimentary wireframe gears and puzzle pieces, in the 90's it was drag-and-drop shapes that you connected with arrows, in the 2000's it was touch-based drag-and-drop shapes, and this decade it's the voice interface that just has a dialogue with you until it figures out what you want. Plus a zillion variations on all of these themes, drawn from contemporary sci-fi.

My point is, despite endless attempts all over the world over the course of 50+ years, no one has managed to make programmers obsolete. Instead, demand for them has exploded with each new leap in processing power. In the 60's computer programmers were a vague presence, somewhere in the depths of the largest buildings. Nowadays parents nationwide worry about teaching their young children how to program so they aren't "left behind".

But there's a catch: If you want to be a programmer for any length of time, you need to keep learning. In a single season your skills could become half as useful as the next guy/girl, because you didn't notice some new advance in the field and learn how to leverage it. The same is true for management. There are better tools coming along all the time that change the nature of your work and the nature of your relationships with partners, but hey, if all the software developers in history - working at the behest of management - have failed to automate themselves permanently out of work, what sense is there in believing that software developers are going to automate management permanently out of work??

I agree that big changes will happen. They somehow always do. But sitting in the middle of current development, seeing floods of cheap slightly-obsolete equipment entering new areas of civilization and spawning an ever-more-programming-savvy workforce even as the state of the art is pushed ahead somewhere else, I am highly skeptical that any revolution is coming that is any more profound or promising than the one that we're already in!