A place I worked at went from fifteen ‘call centre’ employees in 2006 to two in 2011 with the introduction of internet software automation. Automation on a scale that will disrupt society hasn’t started to bite but at the current pace it will come. An excellent book on the subject is Martin Ford’s The Lights in the Tunnel which I finished a few months ago. He does a respectable job arguing that the Luddite Fallacy does not apply in this brave new world.

The Economist:

The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.