Forget that IT degree

Eric Sherman, author of the blog Wired In, says the "brutal reality of cloud computing" is that as machines get to do more, people get to do less. A lot less. As in, so much less they get made redundant.

Nothing new there - that's what the Industrial Revolution was all about. So why is Sherman worried?

In a post discussing Hewlett Packard's announcement regarding its new US1 billion technology investment, which HP says "will benefit clients through new offerings and improved service delivery", Sherman points out that in fact 63% of that "investment" will be spent on redundancy payments for the 9000 high-level IT workers put out of a job. That's a lot of money to decommission people. But it seems that is the price to be paid for the transition to cloud computing.

This echoes a recent post from Martin Ford. Ford is a software developer and blogger who has looked at Google's recent announcement of a machine learning app (read Artificial Intelligence) which can learn from processing data and eventually take over task it is doing (read exit human operator). Ford sees the progressive application and growth of this sort of AI will result in the concentration of power in the hands of a very few, and predicts the white collar worker will follow the blue-collar worker down the road to oblivion. His provocative title Will Google Destroy Itself comes from his analysis that without a middle-class with discretionary income to buy what is advertised on Google, Google's current income model will fail.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends if Google remains smart enough to adapt and re-source its income.

Both authors however see the same outcome for IT workers, no matter how smart or educated. Without the entrepreneur gene, you're just a worker - and therefore expendable.

Which leads to an obvious question: what is it that people offer that machines don't? Something to do with personality maybe. So it is interesting to look at HP's blurb regarding their new investment offering "improved service delivery" and think about the word "service". There's the service that a machine can offer, and then there's the service that a human being can offer - two very different things.

I guess the outcome will depend on how fast AI can be developed to include emotional intelligence. I'm betting on a long time-frame.