There is at least one high paying software developer job for every highly skilled software developer. That is why no one knows a highly skilled developer who they would kill to have on their team who is unemployed.

Even in the Midwest you will hit a six digit salary by your early 30's. There is a ceiling of about $150k that very few even qualified developers will ever cross (again based on the Midwest) simply because there aren't enough Director / VP / CTO jobs to go around. But very few professions have max salaries that even reach six digits, so I really don't see what software developers have to complain about.

Developers often compare themselves to lawyers, doctors, or investment bankers, but they don't realize there is an army of public defendants, general practitioners, and unsuccessful traders who make no more than your average software developer. The ones making $300k+ per year are likely not much more numerous than the software entrepreneurs making similar money. And the lawyers, doctors, etc. making that much money are often essentially small business owners, not simple salaried employees.

It is pretty obvious to me that our country's productivity and economy in general will improve if we improve CS based education. But that is simply because increasing education in general will help our economy. There are very few ways a country can actually invest in its economy in the long term. Improving education. increasing funding of both private and public research, and improving infrastructure are the only ways that come to mind.

So while improving CS education is a great idea, I see no reason why it needs to be singled out.

That won't help, as the wealthy live in a type of walled garden where their kids would all go to the same schools even if they were public schools. I live in a school district with arguably the 4th best high school in my state, private schools included (#1-3 are private). This is accomplished by making sure the average price of a home in my school district is about $600k in a county where the average home price is closer to $200k. We effectively have a private school that is paid for with public tax money.

Let's not pretend this is the only problem with lowering the global population. Let's also not pretend that any time a problem is not easily solved we should just give up on trying to solve it.

It will be very hard to limit population growth, but without some major breakthroughs in science we may not have any choice. Most likely the people on the short end of the stick will be the ones with the least wealth, just like everything else in life.

One problem with looking into the future is most people only think of one thing changing at a time. For instance many people though that as buildings became taller, restaurants and other services would need to be built in sky scrapers to provide basic services. They didn't think of potential inventions (such as elevators) that would simply make it easy to travel back and forth between 40 stories. Many of the tasks you describe feel very similar to this issue.

Robots will not use the same dishes and utensils that humans use to make food. For instance it isn't like you use a robotic arm to physically flip burgers on a pan, you create a conveyor belt that cooks on both sides at the same time. The machines built to replace humans will not only take into consideration the most efficient way to cook food, but also the most efficient ways to either self-clean or be cleanable by another machine.

If only there was a major e-commerce retailer that has already been working on using fleets of robots to make loading / unloading products easier. I'm sure this technology will never proliferate to other industries. [/sarcasm>]

Even if you couldn't accomplish this with digital signs / posters / etc, these tasks are done infrequently enough that a small group of human employees could probably service dozens if not hundreds of stores.

1) Kiosks taking orders. If Walmart self-checkout lines are any indicator, one human operator with six kiosks could probably replace six cashiers.
2) Machines cooking the food. Plenty of machines already help cook food now, but once again I could forsee machines that reduce three line cooks with one line cook and more machinery.
3) Machines packaging the food. Again you will likely need some human intervention, but this also removes a few staff members.
4) Lower number of employees also means a lower number of shift supervisors.

I could easily see a McDonalds crew being cut by half or even 75% with only today's level of technology. The only thing stopping it is the robots are still more expensive than humans. More engineers would certainly have jobs, but probably around the rate of 1 more engineering job per 10-20 crew member jobs lost.

How are we supposed to have any idea what a cumulative lead of 626,892 chips means without knowing how many total chips there are? If there are 650,000 chips then the game is almost over, but if there are 1,000,000,000 chips then there hasn't been any movement at all.

This is some pretty poor journalism.

And when that happens the power companies would need far fewer power plants because peak usage would drop dramatically, perhaps around half what it would be otherwise. This sounds like a great situation.

Temporary solutions to many problems is all we need as technology continuously improves. Take advantage of Time of Use rates today, and in five years switch to primarily solar power as the prices drop even further. Everything doesn't have to be a fix that will last a lifetime.

Your two quotes above are very different assertions. You never said anything about comparing buses to self-driving taxis. Once we get self driving taxis I think anyone would agree they would be more efficient than buses. For one, nothing is stopping these self-driving taxis from being buses when loads are high enough or mini-smart cars when driving one person. When you don't have to worry about a human driver needing to make a living, who cares if a particular vehicle is only in service 2 hours per day? There are numerous efficiency gains to be gained from self driving cars that have nothing to do with cars inherently being more efficient than buses.

Even if their hearts were in the right place, why in the hell would they choose to partner with Infosys on this initiative? The company this group is using for their Code.org PR stunts to train more native IT professionals is basically synonymous with the H1-B program problems native IT professionals complain about. This decision just boggles my mind.

This and other rebuttals in this thread illustrate the problem with how progressive issues are framed here in the United States. The death penalty and universally free healthcare are thought of as ultra progressive ideas in this country, but they are almost universally accepted as the status quo in the entire free world. Neither of these are progressive stances any more. Perhaps 50 years ago they were, but not in this century.

The United States has to go to the developing world to find other countries they are similar to on many important progressive issues. It is embarrassing.

What ad?

Google must have already fixed this issue because all I get is a Wikipedia page and then a few news articles talking about how various people are disappointed about how this topic is being treated by various officials.

Wonderful no true Scotsman argument you have there. Nice to see that everyone who doesn't agree with you has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails.

I only have anecdotal experience from knowing around a dozen teachers as acquaintances, a half dozen as close friends, and one as a family member, although I have never taught beyond college tutoring myself. I have found there are two groups of teachers that in my experience always have very different viewpoints on teaching. They are those who had challenging non-teaching careers before starting teaching, and those who didn't.

( ha, my version of no true Scotman is claiming anyone who doesn't agree with me didn't have a challenging career beforehand, I guess no one's perfect )

I only know four people in the first category, a former nuclear engineer, mechanical engineer, software developer, and chemist (2 high school and middle school teachers). Only two of these people knew each other, although I realize that doesn't help make up for the small sample size. Without exception they described teaching children as a fairly labor intensive but not very challenging career. Well actually there was one exception: one of them thought it wasn't very labor intensive at all after the first couple years, but he is a bare minimum kind of guy (he admits to it, and says that is why he switched to teaching).

I have only talked with three of them about technology in teaching, but each of them believe the majority of their job is better suited to the type of work you would expect an AI in the near future could do. One of them compared it to scantron tests; they don't eliminate all test grading, but they eliminate a lot of it. He did say all that happened was schools increased the amount of testing so the total amount of grading work didn't diminish, but software was still doing the bulk of the work. He is a math teacher, so scantron is probably more common for him than for other subjects, but multiple choice tests are not exclusive to math either.

When people try to say technology will not replace their jobs, they often fall back on the fact that technology won't be able to do 100% of their job. They don't realize how disruptive technology that even just does 20% of their job could be, especially when funding constraints make it more likely to cut personnel rather than find other work for them to do.

Its not really fair to say it has had no success. I have learned quite a bit from MOOCs; far more than I learned in my Masters program at a good private school with the exception of my research project. That wouldn't be true for every student (students who don't learn well from just reading books for instance), but that doesn't diminish that MOOCs and other technology enhanced learning methods have shown great success. This is not even close to the level of removing the need for elementary teachers, but it is significant success nevertheless.

Understanding a student's question is incredibly hard, almost impossibly hard, but then again so is a computer understanding Jeopardy questions.

Teachers view teaching each student as a unique challenge, but that is only because they only teach perhaps around 10,000 students in a career. Even with that small sample size they can still build on experience of what has worked for other students. And that is even with imperfect human memory and biases. Future educational programs will have the benefit of listening to questions from tens of millions of students each year. Questions will stop sounding very unique in these circumstances. Databases with millions of possible examination techniques will be able to use relatively basic pattern matching to see how different students are similar on millions of different metrics.

Every student will still be unique, but each unique problem they are having was likely shared by millions of other students. And the unique way of improving their understanding was probably performed on hundreds of thousands of students. And those students were probably given thousands of slightly different educational experiences while the software tracked how students with similar learning styles reacted to each one.

There will still be gaps in the technology, but no one is contemplating a world with no teachers. When the computer realizes the student's understanding of the topic is not improving, the human teacher is called in. Sometimes that might even be over teleconferencing if specific domain knowledge is required. And every time a human is required, the software gets more data on how to better teach other students in the future.

As I mentioned in my first post, I think a tipping point will be hit once we have technology a generation or two better than Watson in each student's laptop. Or at least cloud based versions of Watson accessible by each student. Just like all attempts at commercializing digital tablets failed in the 90's and early 2000's were forgotten once technology advanced enough to give us the iPad, the failures of the past 20 years to bring technology to the classroom will be long forgotten in the near future.

Watson can give us a good idea of what is possible without strong AI. And Watson will be considered ancient compared to the non-strong AI implementations we will see 20 years from now. Machine learning and NLP can create amazing results without the computer assistants of the future needing what we would consider "true" creativity and problem solving.

Machine learning and NLP techniques have started to show you can get some very intelligent software without strong AI. Watson was able to beat the best human players in essentially a Q&A game, similar to what a digital teacher would need to be capable of. If you look at the evolution of chess AIs, affordable personal computers capable of doing what Watson did will be released before the end of this decade. Cell phones will be able to do it a decade from now. Two decades from now Watson will appear downright stupid compared to the Q&A software we will have access to in our watches. And it won't require strong AI.

Just like all sufficiently advanced technologies, the AI of 20 years from now will appear like magic compared to what we have today. With or without strong AI.