Ford's point is a good one, but it's a bit dishonest. A radiologist's job is processing information - it's easy to move overseas or stick into an algorithm. A housekeeper's job is managing a house and the people living in it - a hotelier is similarly difficult to automate.

Regarding your PPS - it's not so much that demand for software is unlimited, it's that software can be used for far more purposes than food or natural resources. A single algorithm can be used in multiple industries, and given that the world doesn't develop evenly as a whole, there will be software opportunities in the real world (machinery), in processing the real world (commerce), in the virtual world (media), and in processing the virtual world (analytics), and these opportunities will increasingly require more and more knowledge and creativity.

There might not be ways to automate everything, but there will certainly be changes to how we do things that facilitate the replacement and downsizing of some otherwise 'creative' jobs. A housekeeper can be replaced by modifying the nature of the house - a fridge that keeps itself stocked and roombas that actually do a proper job, for example.

My point is that the qualitative difference between a creative and non-creative job is mitigated to some extent by all the 'non-creative' stuff we have to do every day. So even knowledge workers are not immune to 'dumb' automation. An example of this would be remote work and off-shoring, which has opened up software development projects to global competition.

However, the argument still stands - knowledge workers aren't unionized manual labour and if robots are going to replace everything, someone has to program the robots. And, there's easily going to be more 'robots' tomorrow than today for some time to come. So what could end the 'world automation' gravy train we are on right now?

IMHO, the average knowledge worker has a much clearer and more present danger that the chance they might be making themselves redundant - and one that would affect pretty much everyone, not just knowledge workers. They should more concerned about that other thing that destroys demand: financial destruction. The redundancy threat that knowledge workers should be concerned about are the sins of our owners coming home to roost; another depression.

Knowledge workers are definitely not immune to automation, I've acknowledged that in the post. They do set the bar quite high for software and intelligent agents, however.

Regarding your last point, I think a knowledge worker smart enough to automate themselves out of a job will be smart enough to capitalize on that discovery. Moreover, there will always be tasks people will prefer done manually, knowledge-based or otherwise.

What if the problems to solve are becoming easier to solve, because we're more plugged-in into an infrastructure of information? That eliminates work.

Standards are a good example. We love them, but, in a way, they eliminate the creation of middleware jobs that transform the data from one format to another.

Good point, but it touches on a refrain I've seen in the comments: that it might be better to keep the world in an inefficient state. Standards rise up after the complexity of interoperability becomes too much to handle.

As to your point about information, the volume of data these days requires increasingly sophisticated analysis. There seems to be a shift in sentiment around Big Data, that algorithms are still too unsophisticated to provide useful output, and that's a good sign that not only is there a lot of work to be done in this area, but a large volume of information doesn't automatically guarantee quality insight.

Actually the radiologists job has proved difficult to either move overseas (requires US credentials) or automate (CAD still generates a ton of false positives). A radiologist still makes a considerable salary and is the R in the ROAD to success. Plus advances in continuous imaging and interventional procedures make it unlikely that they will see any significant decline.

Exactly right, it seems many people assume that automation or offshoring will be a smooth and seamless process with no trade-offs. That's not the case at all, offshoring and automation present their own kind of problems.

What's dishonest? I don't think I follow.

Do you mean that housekeeper and radiologist were cherrypicked and that in reality laborers are at higher risk of automation than knowledge workers?

No, this part: "A common misconception about automation is the idea that it will primarily impact >low paying< jobs that require few skills or training. To illustrate that this is not necessarily the case, consider two very different occupations: a radiologist and a housekeeper."

A hotelier's job, the well-compensated version of a housekeeper's job, is also difficult to automate. On the flip side, a good deal of information processing jobs, no matter how well compensated, can be automated. I think the point was made rather bluntly, without elaboration.

The point was made just fine. He said that there is not one definitive compensation class that will be primarily affected. It doesn't seem like you've refuted that.

@nrivadeneira: Yes, the point Ford made works, but it works because of the _nature of the jobs_, not because of any inherent property of theirs that influences their compensation (implied by Ford to be the knowledge/labor distinction). Clearly you and I can think of high-income location-bound jobs (bodyguard) and of low-income information-processing jobs (library clerk).

Thanks for clarifying!

Regards agriculture: there remain countries in which the vast majority (over 90%) of the population is engaged in agriculture. Much agricultural productivity has come through vastly increased inputs and capital, and not all countries have access to or can afford these.

The excess labor from agriculture was absorbed into other fields (so to speak). Not always painlessly -- working conditions in early Industrial Revolution factories were terrible (see Toynbee and Carlyle for descriptions, as well as, of course, Dickens). But once the kinks were worked out, we ended up with carpenters and welders and artists and writers and dog walkers.

My own view is that we're starting to run a bit far in that direction, but the coming shortage of raw materials and energy will likely address that problem for us, if not how many would prefer it be done.

I agree that, long-term, high-skill work is at least as likely to be automated as low-skill work. There's no shortage of occupations that were once high-skill and now are largely mechanized. We might not be able to foresee how that can happen with software, but there's a long list of industries that weren't automated until they were, to the surprise of those employed within those industries.

In a small way, one can argue that increasingly easy-to-use frameworks are already having that effect. Right now, with the market for software and software developers growing so rapidly, the efficiency gained from using frameworks is a great thing for the individual programmer. The time she doesn't spend building animations or site looks or CMS's can easily be applied to other problems, and she benefits directly from the increased productivity. But it's risky to assume that the demand for software will always outpace the supply, as this has never been the case for any other labor market I can think of. Markets seek and tend to eventually find equilibrium in these areas.

Good point, but we've always been automating software, and so far the market for it has been booming. The idea of "peak software" seems to involve assumptions that just don't work in the case of software development. It's worth thinking about software as more than just web development problems - think energy, education, entertainment, sports, media, recreation, art, manufacturing (big and small), virtual reality, and so on. The solution space is enormous, practically infinite.

Thanks for bringing that up, excellent article.