Looking back a number of decades to the early stages of the information technology revolution, we can see that COBOL and Fortran were the “visas” into the world of technology. Those workers without very sophisticated programming skills could not interface with the new computer-driven technologies and thus often could not take advantage of the potential productivity improvements associated with those technologies.
But today’s increasingly user-friendly software has enabled workers with far less education and skills to engender value added from new technologies that their older brothers and sisters could not have foreseen a half generation earlier. In particular, we are finding that despite the awesome capabilities of our newer innovations, there are certain skills inherent in all human beings that technology cannot replicate.