Marc Andreesen is good at formulating catchy, provocative statements like this one for a USA Today article:
“The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” Andreessen says. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.”
I like Marc Andreesen for making these wake-up calls in the general media. To be heard, you must be provocative. My world view is similar: If you don’t learn to control a computer, you won’t be in control of your own destiny. However, nothing prevents the rising tide from lifting all boats. We can all learn to control computers. And, importantly, we are all going to be told by computers what to do at the same time. There is nothing wrong with that. That is the one issue I have with this meme. It makes it sound like a bad thing to be told what to do by a computer. But we should all embrace letting computers do work that we don’t want to do our just suck at. There will of course be sad cases where some people find themselves exclusively on the receiving end of this chain of command. We should, collectively, do everything we can to minimize this part of the population.