My dad found himself with a useless MBA in the 80's recession, so retrained as a programmer after I'd already decided that's what I wanted to be when I grew up (not the last time he would steal an idea from me and run with it).
When I was in highschool the fervor over so-called 4th Generation Languages was kicking up and he worried the career might be going away. I wasn't that worried, and I can't recall entirely why I wasn't.
Today I'd say that they will always need mechanics for the robots, but in fact the situation is not even that dire. AI, which I still believe will fail all over again, replaces less than half the code we write - it deals with the decision whether to do something, but not how to accomplish it. And we already know that we're fucking up data management pretty badly. If 40% of my job went away at the wave of a wand (nothing is ever that simple, and it takes a painfully long time to migrate to new systems), we'd have more time to invest in the provenance of data and protecting it once we have it. I'd still be overbooked and our customers would be a little less salty.
When I was in highschool the fervor over so-called 4th Generation Languages was kicking up and he worried the career might be going away. I wasn't that worried, and I can't recall entirely why I wasn't.
Today I'd say that they will always need mechanics for the robots, but in fact the situation is not even that dire. AI, which I still believe will fail all over again, replaces less than half the code we write - it deals with the decision whether to do something, but not how to accomplish it. And we already know that we're fucking up data management pretty badly. If 40% of my job went away at the wave of a wand (nothing is ever that simple, and it takes a painfully long time to migrate to new systems), we'd have more time to invest in the provenance of data and protecting it once we have it. I'd still be overbooked and our customers would be a little less salty.