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To: mistermj who wrote (21666)	8/2/2012 6:13:23 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 85487

Perhaps. I don't read Wired, but they are the kind of magazine that would tell you about such things. The issue with Wired is that often they present a developing trend/technology as a done deal, where in reality Wired is extrapolating into future what may whither away. Part of what I do is to evaluate technologies for companies and tell whether or not it is a solution that will save them enough money to be worth the risk and the headache of the roll out. For example, today not only you can purchase a data-center-in-a-box solutions (old news), but the new generation of these solutions come with self-serve and self-management options that highly reduce the need for IT workers. For example, there are IT management solutions where you define the application profile (how much memory, cpu, transactions, time of the day/year needs to run, the OS platform, etc) along with an inventory of your existing computing resources. The system will then deploy the application image at the right time to whatever computing resource that is most suitable for it (whether or not it is in the cloud or VM farm or just a stand alone server) and will take it offline to free that resource for the next applications. Furthermore, by inputing the new HW profiles into the system, you can greatly improve your capacity planning (something that used be a bit of black art). Now add in a few extra servers and automated phone lines to your vendor's support center, and anytime your servers die their job moves to an available system and your vendor shows up within hours to replace the faulty hw, while your users are not any wiser to it. This reduces what used to be a couple of floors of operations, engineers, and IT architects to at most a dozen people. And if your business is not big enough to need this kind of system, then you can use a cloud provider. Either way, most IT jobs are at risk. If you want to project into the future, then an easy one is to consider what the world would be like when IBM's Watson is the size of a cell phone. That is probably 10 - 20 years away, but the effect will materialize much sooner through mobile cloud and siri-like integration. The key point is not so much about the technology, but the old presumption that automation is a threat to low-skill jobs and by becoming a "knowledge worker" you are saved. In fact your job is much safer if you a janitor, a hospital orderly, or restaurant bus-boy. Your job is also safe (at least for now) if you must use a lot of implicit knowledge and context to be successful at it (e.g. computer game designer) or requires genuine creativity and insight. Everything else, from medical diagnosis and genetics to paralegal work and patent disputes to architecture (building or IT) to many middle management and sales positions is up for grabs by the computers. The picture below is closer to the truth than many realize: