Helping Computers Help Themselves

Jim Posner writes "The IT world's heavy hitters--IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and HP--want computers to solve their own problems.....If you're being chased by a big snarling dog, you don't have to worry about adjusting your heart rate or releasing a precise amount of adrenaline. Your body automatically does it all, thanks to the autonomic nervous system, the master-control for involuntary functions from breathing and blood flow to salivation and digestion." I'd just be happy with a few intelligent daemons to watch my back, like when a program runs amuck and fills up the process list.

Comments

Scary fucking shit.

[dasmegabyte]

Because it means they want to make us obsolete to increase the margins of rich idiots. And it won't save that much money, in the long run, from well run companies.

When I first came to this company, we had something like 20 IT employees. Through "attrition" (read: fire X, Y quits) we're down to 4. Every time somebody left, the remaining folks would write a script to automate what the other guy spent most of the day doing...watching servers for spikes and resetting them, etc.

Did it save us from hiring new people? Our HR department will tell you it did, but it's untrue. The fact is the turnaround time for IT requests has become abyssmal. Adding new segments to our network takes much much longer -- to the point that a new code base for email took 2 people six months to analyze deployment options and deploy, and only took me three weeks to write.

Customers are leaving, siting huge turn arounds for new features and fixes, and we're blaming it on our support dept. Support is fine -- they get requests to us fast. Deployment...well, it could take weeks even to get cosmetic changes through.

Can you imagine the additional testing you'd have to perform before changing a truly autonomous server? And how can you be sure that the self healing server is really healthy, or just not noticing the problem?

Das no like-y. Bad medicine.

Re:Scary fucking shit.

[laserjet]

I think IT type of jobs will just adapt. Instead of being the one watching the servers, you will train to become the one who sets up the server to watch themselves, etc.

It's really no different than the cotton gin automating cotton production: those workers that become obsoleted are retrained to enter the workforce with new skills. It is a continous cycle where those who are obsoleted learn new skills to get new jobs.

That's why our unemployment rate is usually fairly steady (between 3% and 8% almost always) - jobs are always being elimintated and jobs are always being created. In different sectors, maybe, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Who has a monkey job?

[cheezycrust]

All the negative reactions here come from IT workers, who want their job places secured. But you see, as one previous reply pointed out, it's just replacing the monkeys. Imagine you current job. How much of it could be automised? Maybe not in the current configuration, but what if we had more standards (like XML, like standard hardware, ...).

This is going to happen, so the best thing to do is to climb up the ladder, and try to be ahead of it. It may be a lot of work in the beginning, but it could reduce work (and costs) in the end. This is similar to HP + (Compaq + Digital) who are reducing their server line from three types to one. It will cut in our flesh now, but it will allow us to grow as a whole.

It's life, my friends, don't think you're immune for it.

Did you *READ* the article?

[mcrbids]

Although it's ostensibly about "self healing", it seems the largest portion of the page was about databases that self-optimize their queries. They make a big deal about Microsoft having stuff like that out, and that IBM has some big thing coming soon (LEO).

AFAIK, the free and open-source PostgreSQL also has similar technology built in.

*YAWN*

Come back when there's something to read, eh?