The part about automation is interesting to me. One of my long standing goals at work is to script some of the work we do. My group has six people in it. I think I could reduce that to five within ten years (or do more work with the same six). And this is just with an engineer cobbling together some halfway decent python code. Was that Japanese insurance company artificial intelligence article on Hubski? I suspect the work I do is too specialized to economically automate with artificial intelligence today. But the next generation will have to compete with cheaper and more powerful software. Will the next generation face decimation of cubical farms the way my generation faced the decimation of factory jobs?
A few hours ago I did a presentation on new interactive 3D city engines. My superior noted that software like that will eventually be linked to noise / environmental pollution models. Currently, calculating the change in pollution when new buildings or roads are laid down takes 5 work days and a bunch of people to build an accurate model and run the numbers. That city engine can probably do the same thing in less than an hour. It'll mean that an entire floor of our five story building will be out of a job as soon as they can get that city engine up to a good level of sophistication.
Here's the sum total of what they had to say about automation: Here's what McKinsey's ongoing study of automation had to say:This is the generation that has come of age in the long shadow of the global financial crisis — a historically significant loss of global wealth and opportunity — and their problems have been compounded by the automation of many tasks.