"That’s amazing enough -- but what happens when someone gets the crazy idea to let Watson read all of Stack Overflow and O’Reilly and Slashdot and Google Groups and GitHub and all of the other things everywhere that we in IT use as resources to help us do our jobs?"
I don't know but I don't think it'd be good. Really, I've found answers to problems on Stackoverflow (for instance) but also many WRONG answers, poor code samples, and so on. I don't know that an AI could sort it out.
Will AI take out IT work? I'll believe it when I see it. Maybe they will, AI systems are better now than they used to be. But I should note, there was a move in the 1980s towards "4GL" (4th generation languages), which people selling them claimed would allow non-programmers to specify in more-or-less plain English what they wanted the computer to do, making programmers obsolete. Didn't work out. I kind of see "AI replacing IT workers" as analogous to this; the AI will not replace your faulty hardware, physically install new PCs, printers, etc., do any networking, optimize anything for you workload, make sure your licenses are in order (if you have to worry about this), and probably will not be particularly flexible in what configuations it supports. It could be useful as an "expert system" of sorts to help the IT people search for solutions though.
That said, due to being in a college town, it seems here 35 is already old enough around here to have problems finding IT work. The businesses here would rather hire people directly out of college than someone with 30 years or so experience with computers (starting with 8-bit systems, 20 years UNIX experience, CS degree in 2000, and having kept up to date, C, Java including Java EE, Python, a little assembly language, networking (wired and wireless) and having refurbished literally 1000s of PCs working at a computer surplus.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
