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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

More like it destroys more white collar jobs & that is scary for economists that actually are part of white collar America.

(technology has been destroying blue collar jobs for a while now)

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Industrialisation has been destroying blue collar jobs. Computerization has been destroying white collar jobs for a while. You don't need an army of accountants to manage your books. All you need is an SAP-like system and a small team of experts. You don't need hundreds of engineers doing industrial design all day, you just need a few good guys and a CATIA-like system.

In fact a few years ago I read the memoir of a former officer in the french secret services (DGSE). He explained at length how a large part of the job of the DGSE was to accumulate mundane information about everyone, what article who published where, who is close to who, who thinks what, what rumor X says he heard from Y on Z. Over many years of painful accumulation of data through various sources, and with a critical understanding of the reliability of each source, the DGSE built this massive file on all potential persons of interest, which is crucial for the day they need it.

Now 90% of that is available in free access on linkedin, facebook and gmail...

My favorite example is you don't need a graphics department for presentations. Just that one guy with a graphics design background.

It's scary for everyone.

The original "lump of labor" economic argument was that every level of automation lead to more abstract and higher productivity/value work, blue collar labor "just" had to get white collar jobs.

Now that automation has deeply infiltrated the entire manufacturing/retail process, it's starting to eat auxiliary "white collar" jobs.

We're running out of room for people.

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