'past predicts future' is not exactly commensurate with a point of inflection. perhaps a real-life example can help - a medical transcription firm in India hires 25 Indians to transcribe medical records. I then sell the CEO a copy of voice recognition software. He is so happy with the results, he fires 24 and keeps 1 Indian to fix the occasional transcription typos! After one month, he finds the transcription error rate is unacceptably high, so he hires one more Indian to fix typos. For the past 1 year, these 2 Indians & that software has chugged along, making money. Now that CEO is happy, making money, and has opened his second office in India, with another copy of the software & just 2 more Indians to babysit and bugfix! True story. Any way you cut it, that's net job loss. First, a bunch of housewives in Atlanta who transcribed for a living lost their livelihood, but you can rationalize that by saying, hey atleast 25 Indians got hired. But 23 out of those 25 Indians lost jobs & 1 piece of software ended up doing the job! Now unless the Atlanta housewives and the 23 Indians end up working for the voice recognition software company ( a very remote possibility ) or end up in a brand new job ( even more remote possibility ) given their limited skills, there is definitely a block of time when there is net job loss. Ofcourse eventually some of these people will learn new skills and/or are absorbed into new jobs etc...atleast, that's the hope. But the intervening reality can't be wished away. I still think this story will have a happy ending, but so far I don't see it.