Re: [Hampshire] UK digital skills report

Top Page

Reply to this message
Author: Keith Edmunds
Date:  
To: hampshire
Subject: Re: [Hampshire] UK digital skills report
On Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:37:45 +0000, jay@??? said:

> it really narks the establishment and companies that software peeps get
> paid more than senior managers


Correction: it may nark SOME of the group you identify. However, it's
pretty much guaranteed that anything will annoy someone somewhere.

> and there is an ongoing effort by
> companies to lower salaries by making it a commodity job.


Some companies will pay the lowest rate they can. That's usually reflected
in the quality of their staff and hence their business.

> and don't be so naive to suggest that people of the future will need
> more computing skills, if anything computing skills will be required
> less as tooling and AI becomes more sophisticated and automated. 10
> years from now we will simply ask a machine to write software for us and
> only a very small number of people will be in a position to modify that
> base code.


Rubbish. There was an AI program released in the early 80s called "The
Last One", so named because it would be the last program one would need to
buy (it created programs for you). It wasn't. Even if AI advances to the
level you suggest within ten years (it won't), why would anyone ask an AI
system to write a program? Programs are a means to and end (for most
people); it would be more likely that someone would ask such an AI system
to ensure that the car is serviced overnight rather than to write a
program to ensure it is serviced overnight.

As for the quality of AI in ten years' time: speech recognition is an
amazingly hard problem to crack, although the last thirty years has seen
some modest progress. Having a system *understand* speech is a long way
off. Look at how poor computerised translation programs are: the problem
is that they don't understand what is being said. They merely use a
(complex) algorithm to swap one language for another. "The cat is black"
may be easy to translate into "Le chat est noir", but it will be some time
before "I'm going to stretch my legs" becomes "Je vais pour une promenade"
(unless each such phrase is individually coded, but still the AI system
doesn't *understand*).

Why do you mostly start sentences with lower case letters?
--
"Why does God hate me so much? Is it because I don't believe in him?" -
Sidney Morgenbesser


--
Please post to: Hampshire@???
Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------