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Comment by zamfi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure "programming is hard" is the right counterargument - I personally find farming hard, and I'm sure most Westerners do too - but for millennia it's all people did to survive.

Also, have you seen what non-programmers can do with Excel? I'm often blown away by the technical skill demonstrated by people who don't see themselves as technical.

On robots, I suspect general purpose robots are not so popular for the same reasons that the industrial revolution didn't happen in Roman times - human labor is too inexpensive. Factory labor in China and other developing nations is much too adaptable and inexpensive for robots to be worthwhile. But that will change.

I agree with you that it's a pretty long way out!

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There's different kinds of hard.

Pushing a car three miles back to your house is hard. So is beating Kasparov at chess. But clearly they are two very different kinds of endeavor, and I forget how to unambiguously refer to the two types of effort.

And I don't just mean "mental" vs "physical" - I'd place learning a martial art closer to beating Kasparov than pushing a car home.

Sure - and from that perspective farming was a probably not a great example. But surely more people could be programmers than currently are.

Pushing a car is physically exhausting but doesn't require much training and practice. Programming requires training and practice, but I don't know that it requires more training and practice than, say, becoming a lawyer, doctor, martial artist, or other engineer. And the opportunities for practice come much earlier in programming training than lawyer or doctor training!

Though now that I think about it, farming involved more than just physically exhausting work - knowing what to plant, when, how to handle the soil, etc. - those all seem "hard" to me in a "training and practice" sense.

Yes, I would say anyone who thinks that farming is simple grunt labor has never seriously tried to grow food to feed any number of people.

Farming of course involves physically exhausting work, and yes, that's the easy part (at least from an economic standpoint.)

It's definitely going to be sooner than later, though.

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