rethinking of the capitalist bargain that should have started 30 years ago, but didn't because blue collar workers have no political power."

Bring the day.

Sums everything up concisely. Do you know who it's from?

Many of the routine things like document review and forms preparation that were once done by paralegals and more junior associates are now being done abroad for 1/5 the cost. Same thing for some surgical procedures, as Medical Tourism catches on.

The morality will be questioned when the $600/hr corporate attorneys and surgeons start losing business.

Such programs will make high quality medical treatment available to the masses. Legal advice will no longer cost hundreds of dollars per hour. Currently, if you have been cheated by a rich guy and you are poor then you have to take the shafting. Such a program will help level the playing field, and that is a good thing.

I already use a program to do my income taxes. I don't have to go to a tax preparer. Much better for me.

I don't see any real disagreement in the OP that people will benefit, just taking a customer's POV of it all in isolation of anything else.

I think it does bring up the question of What People Will Do To Make A Living. As the OP points out very well, the last 30 years (which roughly covers my live since freshman high school) have been characterized by labor arguments that could be summarized as "blue collar labor will be increasingly automated, so you'll just have to get a college degree and do something that isn't being automated: doctor, engineer, lawyer, etc"

That's what I grew up hearing, and it informed my college education and career decision making. I went into software engineering. FWIW, I really liked it, and it served me well.

I happened to spend a lot of my career in A.I./machine-learning jobs, and the OP speaks the truth. My own profession, by the way, isn't immune in any way. Software construction and testing will become increasingly automated. In many ways, this will be a good thing. It will eventually reduce the number of people who can find employment in software.

I'm not actually sure unionization/labor-movements are going to solve this problem, or if they should. It will be fundamentally more economical to automate, and for better or worse this will also result in performance improvements. Unions didn't prevent automation of factories.

But at the end of the day, what are we going to do with ourselves? For the last 30 years, we pretended the answer was some kind of organized retreat into white collar jobs. That was always at least half bullshit, but what happens when the white collar jobs start evaporating? Who will be working? Doing what? For how much? Will people be able to have a dignified standard of living?

That's the question the OP is asking. There's nothing luddite about that. It's going to happen.

They were afraid that the machines to make cloth would put the people who operated hand looms out of work. You are being afraid that new technology will put people out of work.

Every time some new technology comes along, someone wants to stop it because they are afraid of unemployment. But the reality, for hundreds of years had been that new efficiencies have improved the economy and people's living standards.

We may achieve the first, but the machines won't be supplanting anyone until AC is developed, and that's likely a long way off. I would suspect by the time AC is realized that society will be unrecognizable by most of us today.

As for machines replacing blue collar workers, that's not entirely true, either. Machines still have to be designed, prototyped, built, programmed, and maintained. Humans are needed for all of those functions.

We need to recalibrate both our thinking, the inherent limits of our self-imposed horizons, replace our species' built-in zero sum game doom and pessimism thinking of scarcity with one of infinite abundance (particularly once become more than a one planet species) ...and, yes, the capitalist bargain was well.

Radiologists are losing jobs because hospitals are outsourcing the reading of x-rays, catscans and the like to India. I know a radiologist who is unemployed and he knows many others. Psychiatrists are underemployed because medical insurance requires people to go to MSW counselors and allow them to visit a psychiatrist only to adjust their meds. I don't know about other practice fields.

As for attorneys, many are unemployed or underemployed. It is more due to oversupply than outsourcing but some outsourcing is occurring. Demand for legal services is down, since the middle-class has collapsed and they are unable to retain attorneys. This has impacted the court system; many people appear in court pro se and the judges don't know what to do with them. the major consolidation of banks and other corporations is another reason why demand is down. Major law firms have dissolved in the past few years. Others have downsized considerably.

I am a graduate of a well-known Ivy League school and attended a recent networking event at the Alumni Center. So many well-educated, highly-talented people of different ages and different professions were unemployed or underemployed. I was aghast that such talent was lost and not being used.

to what I'm aware of.

Although I agree that psychiatrists are no longer paid for therapy, that certainly doesn't leave them unemployed. In vast swaths of the country psychiatrists are some of the better paid physicians (especially considering their hours), and have months long waiting lists or have closed their practices entirely.

In New Orleans I know of no psychiatrist which is accepting new outpatients with less than a 3-6 month wait and is also in network for any insurance companies.

Radiologists have been hurt to some extent by night hawk services -- but that sword swings both ways, as radiologists no longer have to be at the hospital 24 hours / day. Again, I know multiple radiology firms that will hire anyone they can get their hands on. One additional note, the Indian night hawk services don't replace radiologists, they supplament them. A US licensed, hospital credentialed, physician must read every diagnostic item which is performed in a hospital. The difference is that an ER doc can get an opinion from the foreign radiologist, and the US one can formally read it in the morning.

it is already here.

I worked in IT for over 35 years. Somewhere around 1995 I had a conversation with a young colleague who was excited about a work from home option offered by our employer. She was so happy that the software infrastructure was stable enough to allow coding and testing to be done "from anywhere". "I can even be at the beach, checking my email, looking at code, running tests, etc.", she gushed.

Yup, the work could be done from anywhere. But the "anywhere" turned out to be Bangalore. After a year or so of validating the software infrastructure by having the local IT staff work from home, most of them were fired and replaced by new employees from India.

This scenario has played out all across America in company after company. Sometimes it is done via IT outsourcing and sometimes via foreign nationals with work visas who work for 1/3 the pay of experienced IT professionals.

Perhaps it is only fitting since most of the IT work done in the last 40 years was implemented to automate tasks done by clerical workers, factory workers, low level managers, accountants, etc, etc. Now it is IT jobs that are deskilled and outsourced and automated.

First they fired the office clerks but I didn't protest because I wasn't a clerical worker. ........ And then they fired me and there was no one left to protest.

much lower cost. 2008 really highlighted the truth of this, but it is usually true even in regular economic times.

So, if anyone is paying attention, that is one place where it already should have happened.

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Either:

1) Of "The same sword we ( upper income white-collar ) used to carve up blue-collar america is being turned on us and we mustn't let that happen to us" tone

2) The "we shouldn't have went along with what happened to blue-collar america and now we've reaped what we've sown" view.

In other words, are they saying de-skilling and marginalization was wrong? Or are they saying "it's wrong because it's happening to us"?

I think there are some similarities to (2), but I read it as more like: "for 30 years we told ourselves a story that the answer was an organized retreat into white collar jobs -- that story was never quite reality-based, but now it's going to get worse, because even the white collar jobs are going to be eroded."

I know the tone of the article is supposed to be ostensibly pragmatic but it still sounds to me like they don't at all lament what happened to blue-collar america.

It's kind of ironic. We have a system that prices based on scarcity, but if scarcity becomes a thing of the past, it has to be manufactured.