[snowwrestler]

The hard question is not whether certain jobs will get automated out of existence--they will.

The hard question is why that automation will not result in the creation of new industries, which themselves will create new jobs. This has happened throughout human history. To say that won't happen anymore is a high bar.

That's why the pace of change does matter. If jobs are destroyed much faster than they are created, then there might be social unrest in the lag.

[Florin_Andrei]

There's only so many times you can retrain a human. Plus, the "re-trainability" rate decreases dramatically with age.

In a decade or two there will be a heck of a lot of middle-age people hopelessly outpaced by the rate of change. 10 years after that, even young people won't be able to keep up.

[jrapdx3]

While there are age-related declines in certain cognitive abilities, in the absence of conditions like neuro-degenerative disease, it doesn't mean that older individuals are incapable of learning new tasks and skills.

Differences among age groups are greatest comparing people in their 20's vs. 60's (or beyond). Even then, differences are modest.

See this article for more explanation: Clark R, Freedberg M, Hazeltine E, Voss MW. "Are There Age-Related Differences in the Ability to Learn Configural Responses?" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26317773

There's also evidence of alterations in "learning style" with age but that's yet another consideration.

[Pica_soO]

Why should this new industry's be save from automation? Yes, there is a tendency to create more "unique" handcrafted items - aka AI cant do unique Art like humans want- but the moment the demand for one piece surges, robotics will be there to take over replication.