On July 15, “Iron Man” Musk said in a speech at the American Governors Association, automation technology will inevitably cause a disruptive impact on the job market. Because in the future, robots will have the ability to do anything that humans do, and do it better than humans.

The attention of the U.S. state heads in the audience was instantly mobilized by Musk, because if this is true, the impact of automation on the job market will be more direct and far-reaching than low-cost imports from the developing world, directly hitting the electoral vote bank of these politicians.

Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a professor at Northwestern University, recently published an article in City Journal stating that the future of automated technology replacing professional white-collar workers will come sooner than expected.

Creative destruction is sweeping through urban centers

The unspoken secret of automation technology is that it is easier to develop a robot to replace a junior lawyer than it is to replace a skilled electrician. This fact also helps explain why economists and politicians are obsessed with “creative destruction,” which just recently they thought would do more good than harm to society (Editor's note: Innovation revolutionizes the structure of the economy from the inside out, constantly breaking down old orders and structures while creating new ones, which then leads to economic growth. (Editor's note: the ability of innovation to constantly revolutionize the structure of the economy from within, i.e., constantly breaking down old orders and structures while creating new ones, leading to economic growth, is a process called “creative destruction”). They argue that technology and automation have increased productivity and created more jobs.

But in the age of automated algorithms, they are less confident. That's not surprising:

Instead of sweeping through factories and farms, creative destruction has swept through urban centers, taking white-collar jobs. The white-collar community has debated the “end of work” for years, but there's no doubt that the future many feared has come true.

Automation: A Surface Novelty, A Deep Revolution

Much of the media attention has focused on the gradual replacement of manual labor - real robots doing things in front of people, far more intuitive than invisible service “bots” on cloud platforms. But focusing on humanoid robots flipping burgers in fast-food restaurants is confusing. The real revolution is happening elsewhere.

Not only that, but automation doesn't explain the shrinking number of jobs in heavy industry: investment in information technology in the manufacturing sector has been very low for the past decade or so. And productivity, the key metric as well as the end goal of automation, has not seen a significant climb. Manufacturing manufacturers are actually underinvesting in technology.

But Silicon Valley has been working on revolutionary software tailored to the malls, Hollywood, hotels, delivery buckets, newspapers, television, finance and even the education industry. Some of the algorithmic software on the market today teaches elementary school math better than a human with a bachelor's degree in education. The vast amount of paperwork currently approved by bureaucrats and regulators is also gradually being turned over to algorithms.

White-collar professionals who make a living in this huge services market will be horrified to find themselves at the end of their tether in the workplace.

Automation's industrial penetration is on the rise

And then look at the longer term, it will be found that automation on the industrial structure of the subversion, far more than that: nearly two hundred “unicorn” enterprises - like the valuation of more than 1 billion U.S. dollars such as YouBuy, venture capital investment tend to rush to the startups -- 90 percent of which are in the service sector.

It's not for nothing that there's such a clear “preference” for industry. Software on supercomputers can perform previously unimaginable information-processing tasks, from interpreting X-rays to managing passive funds, on cloud-based platforms at low cost. But once engineering and hardware convergence are involved, the challenges magnify accordingly, and the complexity multiplies as a result. A trivial glitch that causes perhaps nothing more than a playback jam in video software can have serious unintended consequences when it occurs in the machine's operating system.

Driverless vehicle concept hype is hype, and there is still a lot of work to be done in realizing viable sensors, brakes, and power systems to ensure security and safety. A Goldman Sachs report pointed out that the automotive industry is still one of the few manufacturing industries that is not deeply automated; in other industries, the progress of automation applications is less than 20%-30%.

One day, in the “means of production”, will eventually set off a network revolution. Now, is undergoing radical changes, we may call it “management information”. The effects of the change should be judged by history - economic growth has been greatly increased, and more jobs have been created - but the social pain of this process is destined to affect the white-collar professionals and business management. The information age wave of unemployed blue-collar workers, have taken to the streets to protest, the voice of the high; and this time facing the wave of automation, it is the turn of professional white-collar wail.