Historically, this kind of thing has happened before.
During WW II, bank clerks had the thankless job of manually adding columns of numbers by hand and then passing their work to another clerk who would check their work. They had ROOMS full of these people. However, the war put an end to that. If you have access to the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, you can find the scene where the commando team is being assembled. Lt. Joyce was one such clerk and described that exact job. So many people who came back from the war wanted other jobs that there was a problem in finding enough clerks. But this great new tool called the computer provided banks with a way to do the same job with fewer qualified people. By the early 1960s, it was widely acknowledged that if all computers ceased to exist, the world's banks would collapse instantly because the total population of the Earth (ALL countries combined) was smaller than the estimated number of people who would be required for that kind of data clerk.
During the early part of the USA space program, NASA had dozens of clerks using Frieden Comptometers (an advanced multi-function adding machine of the whirr-clunk-kachunk variety) to do computations to exacting numbers of digits. Having worked with one such machine myself (because my mother had several at the phone company before THEY computerized), I can tell you they were superb but heavy and slow bits of mechanical ingenuity. But so many "computers" (the job title for people doing the computing at that time) were needed to compute orbital formulas that NASA elected to convert to computers using the IBM 7000 series machines. This is described in the movie Hidden Figures, which tells the dramatized but also true story of three important black women who helped break the color barrier at NASA. Again, so few clerks were available that they had no choice but to automate.
Adam, in the last month or so, you more than once bemoaned the fact that automated program creation was becoming a "thing." But it is merely one more manifestation of the unfortunate fact that the demand for certain skills is rapidly outpacing the supply of those skills. I had not seen those particular articles, but to be honest they do not surprise me in the least. If you know the name Mike Rowe (the host of TV show Dirty Jobs), you would perhaps be aware that he has spoken before Congress on exactly this problem. He is actually quite eloquent when speaking extemporaneously.
www.forbes.com
