Pft, the ingredients to make human programmers obsolete arent quite that far
fetched. You take one really smart brain surgeon to map and understand every
single human neuron, have one really smart nanotechnology scientist to make
quantum computers more practical, and a decent programmer to implement a
simulation of a human brain and voila. Teach that human brain to program and
we're pretty much done. Insert the Terminator theme music here...
The fundamental problem with this approach is that what you have
created is effectively just another human. It may have a different
shape than old-style humans, but it is a human all the same. And like
the rest of us, it will not like to be used as a slave: it will want
freedom, it will want luxuries, and it will want citizenship.
(Refusing it these perks will lead to rebellion sooner or later.)
The only potential benefits are that 1) this new human may require
less resources to maintain than the original and 2) perhaps you can
make it smarter/faster/more suited to the task/whatever.
The benefit of (1) above is imaginary in the majority of cases since
most westerners today expect to make a whole lot more money than just
what it would take to keep them alive anyway (a couple of servings of
rice a day really isn't very expensive and doesn't justify annual
wages of $10,000+). Human Mk2 will feel the same way.
The benefit of (2) is plausible - you would effectively get a species
of uber-workers that can do all sorts of tasks for us (and they would
be well paid for it). If you thought protests about immigrants taking
away all the jobs are bad, you ain't seen nothing yet
Cheers
Bent D