And yet another cheap stab at many people reading HN. HN is filled with negativity --if not downright hatred-- towards nerds lately.

Items of zero value? A certain sci-fi author would beg to differ with you. Even someone that would have zero knowledge of anything else but would be mastering programming is still a technopriest. Even with zero knowledge about anything else but computers one still understand more about today's world than most people out there.

I'm not advocating refusing to learn other domains (I'm the kind of person who, when writing a book, decides to learn typography and typesetting software so I can typeset the book myself) but your cheap stab at young programmers (I'm 40) is uncalled for.

The world is going to shift to even more 0's and 1's. Many things are going to disappear and be replaced by 0's and 1's.

If there's one thing common to every single profession out there is that people need to read, write and communicate. And you know what? The tools allowing to read, write and communicate are written by the technopriests.

It's even more "scary" than that: the very infrastructure in place allowing people to communicate (like electricity and Internet) are, themselves, run using software. Not to mention very basic need like the entire infrastructure providing clean water to fullfill one of the most basic Maslow need.

There's no need for someone taking care of a network to understand what's inside the packets of information running through the network. All they need to know is that if there's no more Internet packets travelling worldwide, then there's no western civilization anymore.

The very foundation the entire society now relies on is software. If a worlwide EMP blast would render all computers useless tomorrow the world would probably turn to a mad max horror scenario in a few hours. No more water. No more electricity. No more food. Our logistics would be so screwed that "advanced" countries would fall into chaos. It's probable that in some places people would die after a few days because of the lack of drinkable water and it's very probable that in a few weeks many would die due to lack of food. Not to mention the nuclear facilities which would leak radioactivity left and right and break havoc.

Doctors aren't forced to understand how computers works to do their job. Most doctors are utterly clueless when it comes to technology: they're bound to live in fear of being hacked and not understanding what's going on when they connect to their online banking account and not understand why this or that mainstream article tell them to disable Java in their Mac. I've got doctor friends: they simply don't understand the world they're living in. We're already in the technopriest age. And they're asking me questions, lots of them.

The most computer-wise knowledgable doctor I know was thinking that the latest state of the art way to diagnose using computers was still to use an "expert system", filled by doctors. That's not how it works. These "experts" aren't able to process the amount of information a computer can process and can't find the correlation a computer software can find. Which is why now machines are trained with gigantic amount of information and suggesting exams and deceases to look for that are way more relevant than what doctors would suggest.

I think you got it totally backwards: it's a lot of the other professions that are going to disappear. Replaced by robots, machine learning algorithms, software and... The technopriests.

The ones still able to somehow understand the world they're living in and still able to write the world they're living in.

P.S: regarding mainstream economics I'd like to point out that Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, recently said that it wasn't a bad idea to mint a one trillion coin to deal with the U.S. debt SNAFU. Sure. Why not mint 26 of them and be done with the U.S. public debt!? That is the kind of economics most economics and most universities do teach worldwide: Keynesian economics. I happen to think Keynes was all wrong and keynesians have never been able to predict the consequences of their interventions more than a few months/years forward. There are economists from other schools who predicted 15 years before it happened, before the first euro was even circulating, that the euro would lead to: too many houses in spain, too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany and who explained by which mechanism Greece and Spain would eventually default. Not a single Keynesian has ever been able to do a prediction that precise. That's all I need to know about "economics": that the mainstream is all wrong.

I do also think you put way too much faith in doctors: these people really aren't nearly half as expert as you think in their field. And they are the ones getting replaced today by sofware and robots. There's simply no way a surgeon can be as precise and have as many axis of rotation compared to today robotic arms (explained to me by a surgeon friend). There's also simply no way a doctor can read blood samples and other exams results and be able to correlate that with hundreds of thousands of other results and hence make more correct deduction as to what's going on.

If we eventually end up one day with true AI then everybody becomes meaningless because that day there ain't going to be doctors nor economists anymore.

Until that day programmers (even the one knowing nothing besides 0s and 1s and how 0s and 1s move around) are going to be more and more like the technopriests.