This addresses concerns you have voiced about technological change (our ongoing Third Industrial Revolution) leading to the potential disappearance of jobs. The same concern was voiced during previous periods of rapid change in technology. A quote from the article :

"Technological change increased the demand for other types of labour that were complementary to the new technologies. So, for example, large numbers of supervisors and managers were needed for the vast new factories and companies. Product innovation created completely new markets which demanded completely new types of job."

The article goes on to say that economists at the time could not conceive of the jobs that would appear and my sense is the same is true today.

The real issue for us all is adaptability. Didn't Darwin say something about this? 

Eoin Treacy's view

Thank you for this email and the associated article. The question is not whether some people will lose their jobs due to their skills becoming obsolete because that is already happening. Rather we need to monitor how many new jobs are being created in new sectors as they emerge. Generalisation, adaptability, non-linear thinking, problem solving and creativity represent the buzzwords for the labour force of the next decades because relatively unskilled jobs, heavily regulated by unions are going to less common. People have always followed a “needs must” approach to work and the pace of automation is unlikely to change that.