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Comment by informatimago | Hacker News Reader

One problem that would occur if only ellite jobs remain, is how new ellite workers will emerge?

If mundate programming is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite programmer?

If mundate laywering is performed automatically, how can anybody become an ellite laywer?

For programming, in the same way as computer science education works right now: people write programs that are useless to anybody else, but teach the person writing the program. You can see a hint of how this might work on a large scale with the current crop of massive online courses.

I think the definition of "mundane" is continually shifted, at least WRT to programming.

At one point, "mundane" was Minesweeper in Win32. Now it's a Rails app with authentication, monitoring, logging, background services, queues, AJAX, etc. Or a mobile app with remote backend services. Both are well-covered by intro level MOOCs today, letting new devs cut their teeth by building a Twitter clones.

Maybe the next step for "mundane" programming is distributed computing in the form of Akka, Spark and so forth.

The issue in the article isn't that there will be novice programmers or lawyers, it's that if you can even become a novice programmer or lawyer, you're supposedly already in "Extremistan". The premise is well-contained in the quote early on that "most people are like horses" and can't operate in fields that require primarily intellectual labor.

I'm not sure that I agree with this premise, but it means that it's not an issue of crowding out newbies, just an expression of the popular sentiment that "[insert highly-paid professional position here] are really, really smart" and that to even attempt to become a highly-paid professional x is out of the reach of most people.

It seems that the want to keep out sufficiently bad workers is already being seen by some that employ programmers - that they would rather not have an extra programmer than to have a sub-par programmer, because the 'contribution' that that programmer brings is on the whole negative by mostly introducing bugs that others have to clean up etc. We'll see if the bar for sub-par will keep being raised...

I'm afraid you have misinterpreted. (OP here.)

This is already a big problem in journalism, since the local newspapers (where journalists often started their careers in the past) have, of course, been decimated by technology.

There's blogging. I know, I know, almost all of it is terrible. But it's still a place to practice writing, and the best ones (were "best" should not mean "most followers" but "actual quality", of course) could be contacted by good newspapers.

Blogging isn't professional writing in most cases. Without ruthless editing, writers drift toward the navel gazing and general laziness.

Newspapers had their faults, but they were producing a good product. Pick a commonly blogged about topic, and everything is corrupt -- half the computer storage people are EMC. Baby stuff? Chances are the mommyblogger got free junk from a family of brands that she happens to like.

"Elite" means better than your peers. They will always emerge, albeit with a different skill set.

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