White-collar jobs will increasingly compete with intelligent software, but information-technology jobs will be a bright spot in an otherwise grim job forecast, according to experts who spoke Sept. 30 at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"IT has its tentacles everywhere, and it's going to impact every single industry in existence. And, perhaps more importantly, it's going to impact any industry or sector that arises in the future," said Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.

Ford added that "the nature of machines is changing. They're becoming more autonomous. They're moving from being complements to becoming substitutes."

The event was held by Future Tense, a partnership between the New America Foundation, Arizona State University and Slate magazine, whose Farhad Manjoo moderated the discussion and wrote a series of related articles last week about software replacing jobs.

In a video shown during the event, Manjoo noted how the robots of science fiction usually perform manual labor, but in reality our technology is best at replicating humans' mental work. However, several panelists pointed out that certain professions are safer from artificial intelligence--particularly medicine, law and public education, because they are subject to so many government regulations.

Replacing doctors and nurses with intelligent software--one of the outcomes imagined for IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Watson computer--will be especially hampered by regulations, argued Sarah Kramer, a physician at University of Washington Medicine in St. Louis.

"If anything hits the newspaper about aggregating patient data and sharing it in the cloud somewhere" then there would be public outcry, Kramer suggested. Essentially, privacy concerns will prevent healthcare IT from reaching its full potential.

As another example, Manjoo pointed out how pharmacies must have accredited pharmacists on location even if something like a vending machine could dispense the medicine just as reliably.

For more:
- watch the discussion
- watch Slate's video that accompanied the discussion
- go to the Future Tense website

Related Articles:
Obama's American Jobs Act could help some IT workers
Companies seek IT talent with business skills
Why 'data scientists' are in demand