I understand and agree. I tried to account for that with the "Of course there will be some overlap, because you will have had some really bright people doing so

I understand and agree. I tried to account for that with the "Of course there will be some overlap, because you will have had some really bright people doing some of those jobs that were also bored out of their mind but hey that's the job they could get in 1951... " Those are the people you can train up, to a certain point. Like you said, there might be people in that workforce that were just never given the opportunity but are actually pretty smart. But there's also the ones that just can't do anything above the level of what they were doing in that factory before, even if given the opportunity and training. There's a difference in training someone to perform X mundane manual task vs. Y mundane manual task vs. actually learning something completely new and different that requires 'thinking'. It's the same with "traditional" jobs, like say a shoe maker. Today, you mostly have a few cobblers left that know how to fix your typical "suit's" shoes if they bought proper ones (the Allen Edmonds and the like). When shoe production was automated, the actual job of shoemaker disappeared and the replacement jobs dumbed down significantly, so that "anyone" could do them. You still have some actual proper shoe makers left. The ones that in previous times would have be the master shoe makers that invented new ways of sewing or perfected previous techniques, invented new ways of combining pigments for awesome looking shoes etc.