And hard working can be dangerous. Very, very intelligent workaholics are responsible for some of the most expensive, least efficient work I've ever seen. No matter how hard and difficult, and too complicated things get, they just roll up their sleeves and go to work. And using their super intellect, they can manage it. But everyone else is hurt by that.

Maybe you thought industrious meant inventive, or creative. But if it means only hard working. Then intelligent and hard working is a dangerous combination. Often successful but at a huge cost. Smart and lazy is just as often successful, but without those huge costs.

When smart and lazy people get hard work, they think of ways to make it easier. That's where we get the old saying that civilization advances only thanks to lazy people. Hard working people just put up with however hard or inconvenient work is, lazy people get creative.

I like that you picked those two because they happen to be two that are already disappearing.

Search engines have been fighting SEO for years. And they have pretty much won. SEO was a hot industry just a few years ago, and is already disappearing.

And social media specialization of marketing and PR was taken on by very young people and thought to be a special skill, until recently. But already businesses have figured out that there is nothing special about it. And every marketer is expected to be a social media expert. It's not creating more new jobs, it's just adding those skills to existing jobs.

It's tempting to think that it's different this time, but it probably isn't.

I am sorry, but to me that argument sounds just like the future will be the same as the past. It's not exactly wrong, it's just an intellectually lazy argument to make.

Just one example of this time it's different is the income split between labor and capital. Historically it had been fixed at 70/30. This is across all industries, and all nations, since the industrial revolution. But now labor's share is down to just 62%. And that's happening in places like China and Mexico too, so it can't be simply due to offshoring. Source: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588900...

Secondly, the number of jobs and job titles is entirely arbitrary.

That's not at all true. Automation has always created unemployment. There was no such thing as 3rd world before the industrial revolution. The economies of countries like China and India, which realized on a lot of textile production, collapsed when the industrial revolution took off in the UK. The UK exported both goods and unemployment. And what we call the 3rd world was brought into existence. We are seeing a very similar process today with Germany and the Southern belt of the EU. Germany too is exporting both its product and its unemployment.

If the advance of technology was truly putting people out of work, don't you think it would be evident by now?

Yes, I do. But I don't think we'd see the unemployment rate go up. I am sure we'll first see labor's share of income drop, and wages should stagnate. Which is quite similar to what we are indeed seeing right now.

It's already happening in translation. Instead of a human translator translating an entire text. They simply first feed the text through translation software. That does a pretty decent job, but still makes mistakes. However, the mistakes are obvious to the human translator. Who now just fixes the translation. Most of the work is done by the machine. And a firm with 10 human translators can get rid of 9 of them, and still be as productive as it was it was with all 10 people.

This pattern of automation replacing almost all, but not exactly all, human workers is seen in many industries.