Every occupation is always under attack. Conventional machinists have been attacked by waves of automated machine tools for over half a century. Machinists who did not learn the new skills lost their jobs. Railroads and trucks put horses, wagons, buggies, and all those involved with their manufacture, maintenance, and distribution out of business. Ball point pens reduced the fountain pen industry to a few elitists hanging on. Fountain pens had, not long before, put the skids to the quill pen business.
The only occupations that don’t seem to be reduced by technological advancements are government monopolies. School teachers haven’t been replaced by several kinds of “teaching machines” that have been proposed, the use of which produced better educated students than could be provided by teachers. Bureaucrats, no matter how useless their jobs, seem to be multiplying like flies. They have learned from history that countries will collapse before they will lose their jobs.
These “pacifists in the wonderful war of life” don’t really know what it is to be alive. Like zombies, they move and feel, but at such low levels that it’s increasingly hard for communication to take place between them and those of us who actually work for a living.
