Lagbaja

Twenty years ago, I looked at the gradual introduction of high-powered scientific calculators into my middle school by some of my more wealthy classmates and recoiled at what I saw as the propensity to substitute our brains with computers in the near future. The scientific calculators were supposed to do trigonometry and floating point arithmetic faster than the human who relied on the log/trig tables. I used to have fun beating the calculator totting folks by using just the tables and my pen and paper. I have been interested in where technology will lead to since then and often pride my ability to see the trends reasonably well.

One trend I saw then was that computing skills will be so wide spread, so called computer scientists will be useless. Interestingly, twenty years hence, computing has indeed become near ubiquitous (if you consider mobile phone a computer given that capabilities), but computer scientists have managed to remain in their jobs. However, that ride is gradually winding down as the industry begins its gradual descent (or ascent, depending on how you like it) into utility computing. The process might take another two decades, but the onset of that age is really upon us.

So what will happen then? Read the rest of this entry →

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