Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a photographer. At times I’ve wanted to be professional, but any time I simply wanted to take photographs.

When I finally got a camera in my teens, I didn’t change my mind. There’s something about framing an image that has a very deep appeal. I got a good camera, and by that time cameras were already getting clever, with autofocus and auto exposure.

But almost immediately, there was an unease. As a skill, taking a photograph is not like playing a musical instrument, or painting a picture, or sculpting. The scene is there, the camera can ensure you capture it as it is, so what exactly was my role in my own photography? With digital cameras and smartphones, that question definitely hasn’t gone away.

My conclusion was that anybody could do what I was doing. All they’d need was to want to do it.

Slowly, over years, particularly as I tried to teach others certain photography skills now and then, I realised that, for whatever reason, that isn’t so. I still have no idea what it is, but photography seems to require something that people have or haven’t, and it appears to be innate though that’s hard to prove. Maybe it’s related to the attraction to photography as an activity, for all I know. Either way, the camera doesn’t do it all.

That wouldn’t have been obvious for most of the twentieth century, because there were technical skills. Only people who were serious acquired them, but you needed to learn to measure light, and gain experience about the response of film, and judge focus manually, and know how the depth of field would change with lens settings, even if you didn’t develop your own film. So even for those with talent and a love for the art had hurdles before they could produce what they dreamed of, and that was a barrier between those who admired them and being able to imitate them.

Now I am starting to see a similarity with software development, at least at the level where individuals work. It’s been hard to tell how much of it is about talent, and how much is about the determination to pick up demanding technical skills, and anyone who works hard enough can get to the point of being good at it. It seems clear that it’s one of the many jobs where a certain mindset or natural aptitude is needed, although again hard to prove.

As coding tools get better and better, it feels as though the learning barrier is going to dissolve. It hasn’t yet, quite, but I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t. At some point, probably quite soon, anybody who wants is going to be able to produce functional software that does something they want it to do, if they want to. No need for years of computer science and immersion in languages and algorithms, or logic. As such.

For anyone involved in software development, this feels apocalyptic in many ways.

It’s worth noting what has happened to radiologists, though. According to reports and research, there is now no doubt that AI (for want of a better term) can do a job of reading medical scans than humans. Where it’s been introduced, accuracy has increased. Radiologists, however, are more in demand than ever, because the fact that scans are quicker and faster to interpret means more are done, and there are some things that the tools themselves can’t do, like deal with humans, and judge what those humans actually need, as people. So the job of radiology is changing fast, but more are needed.

I suspect that holds clues to what will happen as tools do the parts of our jobs that we prided ourselves were difficult, and acted as a barrier to anyone else doing them. We won’t be able to justify what we do on those grounds, because others could do them if they wanted.

But not everybody will want to do them, and even with magical tools, not everybody is going to have good results. As with the photography, I think a lot of things, software development included, have some hard-to-define requirements for real success, particularly at the highest levels. Everybody can produce an acceptable photo with their smartphone, with ease. An amazing photo takes either amazing luck, or talent, even so. And for some purposes, people want amazing, not acceptable.

If that is the case, though, there will be a shake-out. Because people without that indefinable something will have found lucrative careers just because of the technical skills, which will have been replaced, while people who do have that something now have no barrier to being able to apply it. More self-taught geniuses may create magical results from their bedrooms, even as industries collapse that previously painstakingly produced equivalent things.

Outside those industries, the world may feel better off and more efficient, maybe?

There may even be more work in total.

But the bittersweet part, even if that is so, is something photography has long taught me – if the barriers are low to doing something, that thing becomes under-appreciated and undervalued.

Any photographer will tell stories of people who asked about a professional shoot, and then went with a “friend-of-a-friend who has a good camera”. The thing I remember most from reading Adam Smith is that he wrote of the difficulty in making a living from something that other people will do for fun. He was talking, in his time, about hunting, but by the time I started photography, that was already the case for that. Things that count as hobbies, even if a professional can do better, take enlightened people to see that they should be willing to pay for them.

I’m good at photography, but I’ve never felt it worth trying to be more than semi-professional, because by now the skills it takes to earn a good living at it aren’t the ones that I enjoy exercising.

It remains to be seen whether my actual work goes the same way, and whether I have enough of the human difference that means I retain any value. These are interesting times.

I think in this case I may have just enough to ride out the changes, but I’ll definitely be hedging my bets.