My wife is working on a paper at the moment and our multifunction printer just kicked out a page.
Computerized printers in every office & home!
Typists, scribes, fountain pen repairmen! Gone, vanished, DOOMED!
Speaking of fountain pens, what about quill pens? If you tried to carry a “pen” knife is many locations you would be arrested as a a weapons carrying homicidal maniac. PETA or the USDA or the EPA or OSHA have probably banned snatching high quality quill feathers from non-free-range geese, to boot!
What will be a “marketable” skill in the future? 92% of fast food jobs is an interesting prediction, but WORTHLESS without a time frame. Doing the market analysis is a capital/labor decision, with price, demand and supply as the factors.
What NO ONE wants to deal with is we live in interesting times. If workers can be replaced by robots, then there are downward market pressures on their market skills. I may like the interaction between myself and the grocery checker, but how much extra will I pay for that? I may like having Johnny Cab to talk to, but will I hire someone’s car out to help them outset the cost through my Tablet app?
Are we seeing the end of capitalism as the source of how we allocate goods and services? If very few have marketable skills, and the robots services are really cheap, how will the allocation of goods and services happen? Communism? Slave economy? Some new and unimaginable?
Google car is the better example. When no one is driving a car, and that drops off as a marketable skill what percentage of the population will lose their source of living...livelihood? When no one would think of using a human surgeon...
The economics is where the real decisions will be make. Whether our current kleptocracy likes it or not, those decisions will be made by the market.
DK