Just a little bit of nitpicking... my mother was one of those secretaries in the 70's and 80's, So I can speak with some degree of confidence about this subject

Just a little bit of nitpicking... my mother was one of those secretaries in the 70's and 80's, So I can speak with some degree of confidence about this subject. I agree that the work was grunt... but it was far from being "unskilled". Companies' needs have not changed that much over time, but the means to achieve those ends have. Low-level office clerks would basically tasked with executing the "organizational software" that kept the business running. They had to follow complex procedures in a very precise way, if the opaque data contained in paper was ever to be used as information. And remember, we are talking about the entry level positions here. Now, there was a career path for those white collar workers as well. I.e. my mother, she never got a high school diploma, or even a junior high "traditional" education. But, she had responsibilities that would be now require a college education, and paid accordingly. For the conversations, I take that she would basically execute algorithms by hand and process information in the same way a RDBMS would in the present, even if she does not have the technical vocabulary to describe it that way. So, the fact that you think those jobs are "unskilled" reflects a lot of how, as a society, we have come to trivialize a whole economic activity that was rendered obsolete by technology. What happened to those people is the equivalent of what would happen to the medical profession if nanotechnology advanced to a point when a semi-literate technician could listen to a patient for 5 minutes and choose from a handful of flasks which mix of nano-robots to inject her.