It's not a question of chance, but difficulty. We don't have one try at making driver-less cars and if it doesn't work we give up. "Oh well, missed that chance!"

Given that some people dispute the possibility of a singularity, let's merely consider the fact that programming and robotics improves over time and the demand for automation is perpetual if not least because business owners want to reduce labour costs. Then the trend will be for all jobs to be automated, where possible. The only questions are:

a) how long will a given job take to be automated? Ie: how difficult?
b) how profitable is automating a particular job? Profitability will offset the difficulty in terms of how quickly the job will be automated.
c) how will we transition from a labour-based economy to an automation-based economy?

As to the article in question, it seems to be pretty weak science. I struggle to reconcile the following results:
Computer Programmer: 48%
Software Developers System Software: 12%
Software Developers Applications: 4.2%
DBAs: 3%

I'm also bemused by the fact that 3 out of 4 of their graphs are ranked more to less automation on the x-axis, but one is reversed.

Really? 1% of all Americans including children are truck drivers? There are about 150m Americans in the workforce at the moment so that would be 4.6% of all workers as truck drivers. The article is just another infotainment website and it sources a trucking enthusiast's website for this outrageous figure. Let's get some more reliable figures.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_tabl...

Right, so 4.4 million workers in the 'Transportation and Warehousing' sector. That sector includes taxi drivers, stevedores, pilots, travel agents, train drivers, conductors, couriers, the postal service... Does anybody believe there are 3 truckers for every other one of these jobs?

http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag...

So the actual figure is 823,130 + 54,990 = 879 000 truck drivers.

It took longer to type this post than actually find that information.

Yep, *sigh* after reading the headline I came looking for a comment like this. I'm a web application developer (LAMP stack and C# .NET MVC depending on where I'm working). In my experience, the kind of people who dis PHP fall in to two categories: generally ignorant or jealous of its success (often former java programmers). I'll address the ignorance: (It is amusing that you blame developers for what in any professional setting is the responsibility of a sysadmin, but that's an aside.) PHP is an astoundingly easy language to learn. It has among the best (if not *the* best) documentation of any language. It is hugely successful (80% of the top 10 million web servers according to the site referenced in the article above). In such a setting we will find /too many/ amateur web site authors who "just need" one simple thing which requires server-side scripting. They're not developers. They're barely web designers. They're often semi-technical people who got roped in to "doing a website" for someone's startup. I know this from reading hundreds of comments, threads, posts and help articles where the developer in question clearly has such a poor understanding of what they're doing - and they often know that themselves but just have to "get it done". I find it frustrating when PHP in general and the skills of PHP developers is judged on the average of all those who have ever dabbled with PHP.