hyponymous :: 100% Unemployment

I write software for a living, and I am becoming more and more convinced that my job will soon – in a few years or a few decades – be outsourced. It won't go to a developer in India or China. Or it may, but that's not what concerns me. Instead, my job will be outsourced to a datacenter. Everything I do professionally, from reading and giving feedback on specs to estimating development schedules to architecting and typing in the code and writing unit tests to reviewing others' code, every one of these things will be subject to automation. We can't do it now, of course, not at any price. But the technological state of the art continues to improve and corporations have huge economic incentives to replace me and my peers with something cheaper; for me, this alone is enough to lend credence to the possibility.

To add a note of irony, it is software engineers like me, especially those with an interest in machine learning, who will be the ones to put us all out of work. We are not known for our solidarity, after all.

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