"Technology has already gutted many traditional manufacturing and working class jobs — but now it may be poised to wreak similar havoc with the middle classes."<p>This is accurate. It is Moravec's Paradox.<p>I keep repeating it because there is a slew of newspaper articles since Trump's victory claiming that Silicon Valley destroyed the manufacturing jobs.<p>This isn't even wrong.<p>It is true that <i>technology</i> destroyed them, but we're talking about Industrial Revolution era technology.<p>Highly Repetitive manual tasks have been automated by machines. Finishing components and configuration of components is mostly performed in Chinese factories or in Western factories, some of which are so highly automated they are called black sites. Anything that could be put into a factory for making the parameters of the task simpler, is mostly already there.<p>The 'low hanging fruit' for disrupting the working class is gone, long gone.<p>It now requires very sophisticated AI and robotics to really impact the remaining working class niches. This is easily several decades away.<p>Guess who performs a lot of work with raw information? The middle classes. That's why they are in the crosshairs of Silicon Valley.<p>A cynic might suggest this 'panic' over the working class losing their jobs has a lot more to do with the middle classes losing theirs.