I'm an automation specialist, and have been trying to automate myself out of a job for the last 10+ years now.<p>CAW is right - work has been shifting - geographically as well as technologically. I have found that does not slow down my work at all.<p>Shifting globally will be replaced with a lot of automation. A lot of lower tech jobs were temporarily shifted to countries with cheaper labor. I've got news for you, if your job is simple enough to be performed by cheaper labor, then it's simple enough for a shell script. After our company shifted 10k+ US help desk jobs to India, a year later I created the automation that put the 15k Indians out of work (payback is a bi$%^).<p>Now, I work for a cloud based company. The technological shift now means that automation I had to create from scratch to automate the build of a system has become much more common place. AWS, for example, has API's to interact with their services, build new servers, monitor, etc. There's Chef, Knife, Ansible and a million other tools to perform tasks. You still need someone who understands the underlying technology and principals, as there are gaps between what the automation does, and what humans are capable of. There's also gaps between pieces of automation.<p>There's talk of programmer jobs being automated. When I hear that, I think of the contrast between developers that use WYSIWYG editors or IDE's, versus developers that code from text editors or VIM.<p>Sure, in MS Visual Studio, you can drag and drop complex elements into a GUI layout, and they'll work to a certain extent. The code underneath is proprietary, fugly and filled with unnecessary bloat. They try to put everything in, in case you need it later. And of course, as a developer, you have to understand how to hook them all together and make it work. It's not magic, and not even close to automation. At best, it's assembly line production. There's less consideration over performance and efficiency of the code - all they care about are the widgets.<p>A developer who uses text editors becomes much more proficient, writes leaner, better code, and understands the processes behind the widget much better.<p>If you're a developer, you'll likely always be in demand. If you're worried about automation taking your place, I'd advise becoming the automator. You will never be short of work.