It's midnight...
Anyway I'm guessing you haven't read what I wrote on the topic of programming - I would love, absolutely love, if one day every child learned to program in the 2nd grade (the fundamentals, of course, in a symbolic language). I strongly believe that our relationship with computers is essentially symbiotic, and the country best positioned to thrive in this strange new world is the whose citizenry is able to essentially speak the language of computers, to make them do tasks.
Reading, writing, arithmetic, programming. The ability to code should be as fundamental as the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide or read a sentence, and I would love to live in a world where every American can write programs to help them solve problems. Where doing so is entirely conventional and done a dozen times a day. My first internship, many years ago, was in a lab at MIT doing exactly this - creating a symbolic programming language to teach fundamentals (
http://scratch.mit.edu), albeit in a far more primtiive state than what it has become. But I continue to believe in how vital the work is. Educating kids in programming is enabling their future and we _must_ get them early, just like science in general.
In other words I would love nothing better than the skill that makes me unique and employable becomes utterly conventional. It would become as prosaic as basic literacy. It would be a better world for it, and I would happily find a new career. I've reinvented myself twice in the past fifteen years already, so what's a third time! At my core I'm an enthusiastic evangelist in the liberating power of technology. That is where my position comes from. Once upon a time, the factory job looked to the farm hand much the same way the software engineering job looks to the factory worker today. Times change and we cannot be afraid to change with them. We should EMBRACE the opportunity to transform ourselves.
The moment we stop doing that as a people, we'll stagnate and decline.