[crankylinuxuser]

On a different reading and assessment:

Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls.

Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search parameters given. All the gruntwork can be contracted can be cheaply contracted with little knowledge about the actual case. Then, a paralegal, again contracted out, can sign the appropriate NDA and do the paperwork for the filing. And finally, the actual lawyer just signs their name after a quick review. This is doable right now.

We also see this in medical establishments, where interns (aka: unlicensed people) can actually do surgery under a doctor's license. I could see mega-health orgs using maybe 4-5 doctors, and hire hyperspecialized interns to do the gruntwork. The doctors would primarily overview routine stuff and take over in catastrophes.

The only people who're safe right now are us automators. My labor = 1000 or 10000 physical laborers, as my tools (computers) give me leverage of a massive multiplier. A journeyman's tools maybe provide *5 labor speedup. And these contract delivery people are literally 1x. (It's shitty to compare, but that's what capitalism already does with $$$/yr)

[amelius]

Except lawyers and doctors are highly protective of their employment and status. There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field. And there's the FDA which controls medical practices, and since they consist of medically trained people, they are probably also highly protective of the status quo.

[chimeracoder]

> There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field.

The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the amount of funding available.

Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.