There are more bank tellers today in USA than at any other point, despite the growing number of ATM machines.

https://www.aei.org/economics/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-ro...

This doesn't always happen mind you. But it shows that your (and my) economic instincts are piss poor. We can't just assume what the future holds.

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Another few examples:

3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.

Automatic Drum machines didn't kill drummers either, but allowed for more music to be made in general.

The only thing that automation "killed" recently was Lawyers, as online webpages that auto-generated common forms removed a ton of jobs that Lawyers used to do. IIRC, Lawyers are in somewhat of a decline because of this.

So it just goes to show that no one really can predict these things.

> 3D animation has killed a lot of tweening artists (the people who smoothed out animations for Disney Films like 101 Dalmations or Sleeping Beauty). But 3d animation created the need of modelers, texture artists, riggers, and more.

together with the previous comment on mechanics and stablehands, i wonder how many people in history grew up training and wanting to be a mechanic, only to be told, sorry we just don't have that many automobiles in the world, we need more stablehands. i wonder how many people went to do fine art in school only to be told 'look you have good skills and all but we just need more tweening artists'.

the pace of technological progress is fast - but not so fast that people being trained in art must move within a year!

I think retraining to an adjacent field is definitely possible - the only thing i see disagreements in is the cost, and who bears that cost.

The evidence is that despite constant growth of productivity since industrial revolution, unemployment is still low and not 99.99%