NPR has a story about How Technology Is Eliminating Higher-Skill Jobs. It features IBM's Watson System, that can beat the world's best human Jeopardy competitors. This technology is currently being used to automate the fields of law and medicine, so a lot of very technical jobs will disappear from some quite high-paying and respected professions.

Rather than rage against the machine, I think we need to embrace it. The survivors of the infopocalypse will be those who leverage the technology. Bring on that A.I. augmentation! I'm not sure what the socio-economic/political consequences will be if the trend for increasing unemployment continues. I am sure that we can't stuff that genie back in the bottle, and our society will need to adjust accordingly.