Automation is or was an overblown fear? Consider that when these children were making their astute predictions, a company would have entire rooms filled with s

Automation is or was an overblown fear? Consider that when these children were making their astute predictions, a company would have entire rooms filled with secretaries and typists handling mail. Each individual could read, compose a response, and mail out a few dozen letters a day to communicate with suppliers, vendors, customers, etc. Today, a companies communications department might be a couple people. And they can handle a few hundred emails before lunch. And they don't get paid any more (adjusted for inflation and all that jazz) than the individual working as a typist in 1980 would have been. One of the ladies in the video shared a concern that there would only be jobs for high-IQ people who could use a computer. That certainly didn't take into account that computers would become tremendously easier to use, but I do think it hints at a problem. It's easily seen that our societies have been eliminating the middle class and splitting into a much more widely disparate lower and upper classes... but I think it might more be moving such that the 'middle class' is only knowledge workers, particularly those working in software. This movement likely would have been quite abrupt if not for the establishment early on of wage fixing by the largest companies (which they were convicted for), but it seems to have been accelerating the past 10 years. It makes some sense economically (not its magnitude, it should be much larger, but its existence) because software is a productivity multiplier unlike anything in world history, but doesn't it bear out her concerns? Sure when factories came around, craftspeople could transition to working in restaurants, or as cashiers, or working in the distribution chain, etc, because those were things that could be picked up on the job. While using computers has gotten simpler, building systems fundamentally cannot beyond a certain point. If you're building a system which must track 100 things, you must be capable of dealing with those 100 things. If that's something which is beyond your capacities, then its not just a matter of getting trained. I don't expect automation to be a large-scale problem as quickly as some do (how long have we been hearing about automated factories and how many do we actually have? A long time and not many. They are hard problems.) but I do think concerns are warranted. Concerns were warranted when factories were developed, and we probably would have benefited from some forethought there too. We still carry many of the social changes that occurred to handle the densely packed urban centers that grew up around factories despite none of their original motivating factors still existing. We will most likely see changes on that scale, and strife to match if we just let things happen.