There's some big flaws in the argument that we'll find new jobs to employ many thousands of industrial workers in. First, retraining someone in their 40s or 50s

There's some big flaws in the argument that we'll find new jobs to employ many thousands of industrial workers in. First, retraining someone in their 40s or 50s that have been working at Coleman or some other firm isn't going to likely happen. Mostly because the workers themselves either never completed the equivalent of high school or barely got by. Most of that retraining would have to be in complex tasks and not old fashioned data entry (those kinds of jobs are the ones that are being replaced by software automation and auditing). So, that means fewer still can make the leap from working on a manufacturing line to software development or some other skills based position. You just can't drop the equivalent of Homer Simpson into a code camp. It's just not going to happen. Second, there's not enough demand for such people in such a new economy. For example, I've known people who've worked on all kinds of software from games to enterprise development and all instances when a product was finished the amount of staff ever needed to maintain it was many times smaller than what they had during development. It doesn't matter if you employ waterfall or agile development, if your product only needs 20 people versus 200 people to maintain a product after it's release and future releases then you're not going to hire 200 people ever again. Third, many modern jobs are shifting to what seems like contract work via employment agencies like Volt and Man Power which bothers me because the benefits are greatly reduced without the equivalent increase in wages to offset this (especially in healthcare). Unless there's something I'm not aware of that could absorb all those thousands of people, I'm just not buying this theory that we'll just create new jobs out of thin air. Past performance is never an indicator of future returns.