I was in IT for about 40 years, after about ten years in publishing, which was being rendered obsolescent even then, with the migration from metal type to electronic typesetting. The automation of IT at the time was carried on in the improvements in compilers, which enabled ordinary smart people like me to program them. Outputs were primarily paper at the beginning.

As computer chips doubled their speed every year or two by cramming their modules closer together (Moore’s law), more complex software could run without running out of resources. The complexity, however, did not make it possible for more ordinary people to use computers. Instead, the requirements started to funnel into specialties such as databases, spreadsheets, Web pages, interactive Web pages and applications, and finally, security applications.

Each of these specializations required more education and/or experience. So an entry-level programmer needs to know more and more about less and less, as they say. These changes make the programmer more powerful, but also a rarer bird. One individual can now do the work of a team of a dozen or two (possibly with a lot of unpaid overtime).

It is a great joy to spend one’s working life in using one’s brain, and I enjoyed it most of the time. Fewer of us will be thus privileged in the future. I suspect that many skilled jobs will narrow in just this way.

So as a society, we need to face up to the fact that not having a great job, or a job at all, does not indicate lack of intelligence, character, or desire to work. As the very rich frequently do nothing useful, so the rest of us must be allowed to choose that career path (call it very early retirement). We can then explore the many jobs that are available to a volunteer, such as teaching little kids to read, one that I have embraced in my retiirement.