From: julio@diegidio.name   
      
   As far as I can tell:   
      
   The future of software and systems development, i.e. the future for   
   software professionals (information and software engineers chiefly,   
   but also so called vertical programming of systems and devices) from   
   analysis to delivery, is going to be in what we today call industrial   
   automation, but soon will just be *automation*, as there won't be   
   much production that is not fully automated and fully incorporated   
   production.   
      
   Of course, there is also AI and Data Science that are going to be most   
   relevant, but those are not jobs for the *professional programmer*,   
   more for the mathematician with maybe some science, and marginally   
   for the analytics database expert, that itself being more of a   
   vertical programming scenario.   
      
   In a nutshell, the jobs we programmers are going to find, with or   
   without AI all over the place, and with or without Data Analytics   
   all over the place, are going to be all those that are relevant to   
   *Industry 4.0* (i.e. "total automation"): from analysing and designing   
   the systems, to implementing them, to the robots and cobots, to e.g.   
   the vision systems, and the access control systems, and whatnot,   
   nowadays indeed also powered by AI, and the PLCs, and the device   
   drivers, and of course all the electrics and mechanics, which to   
   some extent too are about programming, since *we, and only we, know*   
   *how to overall design and architect increasingly complex systems*:   
   the functional components, the machine cycles, the data structures,   
   any integration and interoperation protocols, and so on...   
      
   Hope that helps (the youngsters),   
      
   Julio   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)