This essay names five persistent roles in computing — Investigator, Compiler, Dispatcher, Debugger, and Validator — recognizable across every era from the calculus-tabulating clerks of the 18th century, through the human "computers" of the 1880s and 1940s, to the agentic-AI systems now emerging. Following David Mindell's reframe (ask not whether humans are involved, but where in the system they sit), it argues that the structure of the work — problem → translate → execute → validate — is older than electronic computing and is unlikely to disappear in the next layer; what migrates is the embodiment, not the role.
Brian Bingham (Mon,) studied this question.