[lots of good stuff deleted]
> In the larger system, most of the jobs that people are losing didn't
> exist 50 years ago and won't exist 20 years hence. There is no heavenly
> mandate that there be milkmaids or COBOL programmers or auto workers in
> certain numbers, or in certain places, or over a certain span of time.
>
Amen! Most of the people I read wringing their hands over technological
change don't take this into account. Not that the transitions aren't
often difficult and socially stressful - which you alluded to in your
next paragraph - but that there simply is not and never has been any
reference or standard measure of "how things ought to be". In my own
profession -- software engineering -- it's already noticable that as the
tools get better the really *difficult* intellectual effort required is
actually less; and on a broader scale, thousands of jobs begin to open up
that are nowhere near as "high-tech" in reality as they appear to be in
the Sunday help-wanteds. That's part of the process of assimilation that
is constantly going on. There must have been a time, back in the early
Middle Ages (I think - haven't got a reference handy) when the ability to
do arithmetic in that newfangled arabic number system must have been
high-tech; and it probably stayed that way until some enterprising people
started travelling around Europe putting on one-day training seminars... .
But now I've strayed from the topic.
Regards