No, I am not gonna talk about wages or market prices of your finished products. Instead I will talk a little about the fragility of our – read coders – situation.
We are basically on the top of the technological tree, using the most advanced tools to write top products for a technocratic society. We were inspired by movies about hackers, lured with wages above normal and compelled by the absolute control that we have on our creations. But we are so frail. We are dependent on the current state of technology. If any of the pillars would fall, we would face extinction.
Think about it. What do we need to do our jobs? We need electricity, high tech hardware and access to information. But these are the things that are more prone to disappear in case of calamities or war. Jeez, when you think that an earthquake can take out the whole powergrid; what do you do with your 800 watts hungry machine? Biking on a dynamo is out of the question. What will you do when an EMP strikes (ok, this might sound science fiction but so was a quad core cpu until a decade ago)? Will you write your 100 thousand software on a ENEAC card punching swallowing machine? What do we do when internet fails because of some foreign cybernetic assault?
We are maybe the most specialized field of work, and if we look into the history and evolution of the species, most highly specialized organisms were doomed to extinction at some point.
Can we survive a software development apocalypse? I don’t know and I ask myself sometimes “What do I do then”. Do I have any other skills? Can I build something with my bare hands? Can I sustain my family if I am not employed as a software developer?
Even worse, can I, or we, recreate the technological state of things if we need to restart anew? How, hard is it to create an integrated AND gate when you start from raw sand? And that is only if we can create reliable powersources and the surrounding ecosystems.
And then of course is the possibility of a science fiction future, where technology is king and AI is omnipresent but in a good way and all the above questions are for nothing … who knows, time will see but questions will still linger …
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