The problem was not simply the loss of good jobs to workers in foreign nations but also automation…  Remember bank tellers?  Telephone operators?  The fleets of airline workers behind counters who issued tickets?  Service station attendants?  These and millions of other jobs weren’t lost to globalization; they were lost to automation.  American has lost at least as many jobs to automated technology as it has to trade. 
Robert Reich, Aftershock:  The Next Economy and America’s Future

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Ok – if you force me, I think I would have to admit that I like reading Farhad Manjoo more than just about any other writer.  He is witty, insightful, to the point.  And this article puts detail and explanation to the idea in the quote from Robert Reich above – automation is genuinely threatening our economy.

The article, at Slate.com, is titled Will Robots Steal Your Job? – You’re highly educated. You make a lot of money. You should still be afraid.  He uses words like:  “peril,” and “terrified.”  What he says is that if you really want to know where the jobs have gone, and are definitely going, they are going to nonhuman employees.  Reich and others have sounded the alarms.  Manjoo makes it real – and the real really is frightening.

Here is his main point:  

At this moment, there’s someone training for your job. He may not be as smart as you are—in fact, he could be quite stupid—but what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in drive, reliability, consistency, and price. He’s willing to work for longer hours, and he’s capable of doing better work, at a much lower wage. He doesn’t ask for health or retirement benefits, he doesn’t take sick days, and he doesn’t goof off when he’s on the clock.
What’s more, he keeps getting better at his job. Right now, he might only do a fraction of what you can, but he’s an indefatigable learner—next year he’ll acquire a few more skills, and the year after that he’ll pick up even more. Before you know it, he’ll be just as good a worker as you are. And soon after that, he’ll surpass you.
By now it should be clear that I’m not talking about any ordinary worker. I’m referring to a nonhuman employee—a robot, or some kind of faceless software running on a server.

And for those who say, “no worry – we will just create new kinds of jobs,” well, I hope so.  But Mr. Manjoo isn’t so sure.  Consider these concluding paragraphs to his article:

Most economists aren’t taking these worries very seriously. The idea that computers might significantly disrupt human labor markets—and, thus, further weaken the global economy—so far remains on the fringes. The only deep treatment of this story that I’ve seen has come from a software developer named Martin Ford. In 2009, Ford self-published a small book called The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future. In his book, Ford argues persuasively that computers will redefine the very idea of “work” in the modern age.

When I spoke to him recently, I asked Ford about economists’ standard rebuttal to fears of automation—the story of the decline of agricultural jobs in the United States. In 1900, 41 percent of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Over the next 100 years, the technological revolution in farming dramatically increased productivity, enabling fewer and fewer people to produce more and more food. By 2000, just 2 percent of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Yet this shift, which required millions of people to move off farms and acquire new skills, didn’t ruin the economy. Instead, by reducing food prices and freeing up people to do more profitable things with their time, it contributed to massive growth. Why won’t that happen again with information technology—why won’t we all just learn new skills and find other jobs?

“There’s no question that there will be new things in the future,” Ford says. “But the assumption that economists are making is that those industries are going to be labor-intensive, that there are going to be lots of jobs there. But the fact is we don’t see that anymore. Think of all the high-profile companies we’ve seen over the past 10 years—Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter. None of them have very many employees, because technology is ubiquitous—it gets applied everywhere, to new jobs and old jobs. Whatever appears in the future, whatever pops up, we can be certain that IT will get applied right away, and all but the most routine-type jobs won’t be there anymore.”

Over the next few days, I’ll be examining how Ford’s predictions are playing out in a number of professions. I’ll start by looking at how the people in my own life are being replaced by machines. First, I’ll look at my dad’s career, pharmacy. Then, I’ll examine my wife’s line of work, medicine. In my third piece, I’ll turn my investigation inward—how will robots replace writers like myself and Web curators like Jason Kottke? I’ll end the series with a pair of stories on how machines will change the lives of lawyers and scientists. I hope you read every part—if you’re going to outsmart the robots, you’ll need all the help you can get.

So, I will be following these articles in the coming days.  I suspect that I will enjoy reading them — but I won’t like them very much.