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by msoad 4537 days ago
We had a discussion about this. What is the right thing to focus on to be safe in future? Everybody knows software is eating the world and as a consequence it's eating jobs. Sooner or later, your software hand crafting job will be replaced with a software that does it better and of course cheaper. Where should we go to be on bleeding edge that software can't reach yet?

One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university. Specially if you are already a software engineer that makes a lot of money for hand coding things that seems obvious to not be a hard problem to solve.

I personally believe that the state wr are in right now is temporary. Nobody can make a living in future by coding simple web pages or CRUD backends. It's gonna get automated way more that what we can imagine today.
1 comments
tbrownaw 4537 days ago
One of suggestions was Machine Learning and meta programming. Other one was robotics. Problem with both of these is that entry barrier is pretty huge. You have to go to university to do it well and not everyone can go to university.

Why? You need to put in significant time to do well, but are the needed resources (books, people to talk to, etc) really not available outside of a university?

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analyst74 4537 days ago
I am curious how one can break into robitics as a web developer.

The two obvious paths I can see are: a) quit job and get masters or even PHD in robotics; b) become rich and found a company like Elon Musk.

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derefr 4537 days ago
My own plan, from a similar starting position, is to buy one of these[1], and start tinkering with it until I have a good set of "hard problems" I've run into. Then, read the textbooks, with a motivated eye to solving those problems. I won't necessarily solve any of the Hard Problems, but I'll hopefully get a journeyman-level ability to converse with others in the field about those problems--and from there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to making friends in the field and being tossed pithy journal articles to read.

[1] http://www.irobot.com/us/learn/Educators/Create.aspx

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