https://newrepublic.com/article/121712/slow-death-secretary

A similar shift is occurring with paralegals. Combine AI with massive legal data, firms could drastically reduce the hours of legal staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/technology/lawyers-artifi...

The same could occur for support staff in the medical field, e.g., radiology.

Doctors and lawyers themselves are unlikely to be as affected in the next several decades, except they may be under pressure to take up more clients or including more sophisticated analyses increasing workload. Job requirements will likely require higher and higher levels of education.

Instead, what really happens is that someone makes an incremental advance that allows 9 doctors plus a machine (plus, probably, some tiny increment of people servicing the machines) to do the work of 10. All it takes is to find the most routine aspect of some job and automate that away...

You provide the perfect example in your utterly incorrect summary of the effect of office software. This almost entirely wiped out a huge number of secretarial jobs.

Isn't there a shortage of doctors already? Doesn't seem like the most vulnerable field to incremental automation.

Devastating to an industry in its current form. Taking medicine as an example, I just don't see any reason to expect that, if you automated away 50%+ of the current job, you'd require less, highly trained, medical staff.

Sure they'd be doing quite different jobs, for the most part. Sure some of the current crop won't want those new jobs. But everything I've seen wrt automation encroaching on highly skilled employment would suggest that there's little to no reduction in employment. Quite the opposite.

I tend to look at it a different way. What is the likely limit on the need for medical expertise ad how far away are we from that limit? I would suggest that we're currently a very long way from capacity for medical expertise and you could automate away a significant portion of the current roles without substantially affecting numbers.

I could, of course, be wrong. And, of course, one can extrapolate to a point where AI has perfect knowledge of all human anatomy, natural and enhanced, as well as having innovation and design skills well in advance of humanity. But we're an awful long way away from that.

Near zero I'd imagine. That's beside the point though. The fact that it's possible is what matters. The actual roll-out of it is just a matter of time.

Under Bush and Obama almost all the jobs created were temp jobs, they even had to expand the definition of what constitutes a job.

Can you cite a source for this? The Bureau of Labor Statistics etc. has been using the same U1-U6 unemployment metrics for decades.

I will see if I can find a more official source than this:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/10/donald-lambr...

You asserted that "they [the Obama and Bush administrations?] even had to expand the definition of what constitutes a job," which is not supported by that article.

I have had this debate before, and I have yet to find any evidence for the claim.

They changed the U3 focus under Bush I will see if I can find the article about it I read way back.