The example is a bit cherry-picked. You could argue that the process went like this:
* 1980s - "takes a lot of time and money to churn through old legal docs, let's hire a paralegal"
* 2010s - "it's easy to churn through old legal docs, making it much easier to manage multiple legal cases in parallel. Let's hire a paralegal to help me juggle all of these cases."
...
* 2020s - I've hired HireASuperParalegal.com to do all of my paralegal sleuthing. They help me manage the workload of four paralegals for the price of one.
Meanwhile, how about telemarketers? Have their numbers increased in droves like--apparently--paralegals? I suspect not.
Anyway, @ergest mentioned that the doom-and-gloom is tiresome, and it certainly is. Personally though, I just find it a fun thought-exercise to think through how we'll matter in the long-run. In the meantime there'll be a "new" class of workers whose jobs move from paper-pushing to being specialized software-users and from there... what? Certainly "computer-or-software fix-it guy" jobs will be universally useful from now into the foreseeable future, but will they pay well? :-)
* 1980s - "takes a lot of time and money to churn through old legal docs, let's hire a paralegal"
* 2010s - "it's easy to churn through old legal docs, making it much easier to manage multiple legal cases in parallel. Let's hire a paralegal to help me juggle all of these cases."
...
* 2020s - I've hired HireASuperParalegal.com to do all of my paralegal sleuthing. They help me manage the workload of four paralegals for the price of one.
Meanwhile, how about telemarketers? Have their numbers increased in droves like--apparently--paralegals? I suspect not.
Anyway, @ergest mentioned that the doom-and-gloom is tiresome, and it certainly is. Personally though, I just find it a fun thought-exercise to think through how we'll matter in the long-run. In the meantime there'll be a "new" class of workers whose jobs move from paper-pushing to being specialized software-users and from there... what? Certainly "computer-or-software fix-it guy" jobs will be universally useful from now into the foreseeable future, but will they pay well? :-)