This is the story of Manna, the manager of a fast food restaurant. It's a great read, and perhaps a little shocking. Manna is a piece of software, reading sensors, reacting, and letting employees know what to do with a synthesized voice through a set of headphones that the everyone wears in a fast good restaurant. In this tale, Manna evolves into a software system that is spread throughout many industries, essentially displacing managers and many workers at all levels in all industries. With the ability of these different "Manna" variants to communicate and negotiate contracts among themselves, the US devolves into an Orwellian nightmare place to live.

It's a science fiction story, but the fears that it evokes are similar to those I've heard expressed from many people in the IT field across my two decades in this industry. A friend of mine left IT a decade ago, while working as an Exchange admin for a company with 50,000 mailboxes. He was sure in 5 years his job would be automated and eliminated. I knew a few people that moved out of DBA work in the early 2000s, after Microsoft released SQL Server 7 and 2000, with some marketing messages that the products didn't require a DBA. A few years ago I heard a few people arguing that PowerPivot would kill most BI development jobs because it was so easy for end users to build their own analysis applications.

Read the rest of "The Robot DBA" at SQLServerCentral.