[tgflynn]

I couldn't reply to Estragon's comment below, so I'm replying here.

I'm convinced of it primarily because I'm convinced that the majority of activities that human workers perform do not require general intelligence (ie. strong AI). This includes most manual tasks : cleaning, cooking, customer service in restaurants, etc, but also many tasks performed by office or even "knowledge" workers.

A product my previous company developed replaced over 20K workers over a period of years. Few people even know it exists.

Once you are aware of this and follow the news you see it happening in virtually all domains: e-discovery systems replacing attorney hours, automated news story generation, etc. One area that has been lagging is robotics but this will start to develop very quickly, especially with the new DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Now to be clear many of the "Big Data" applications people are talking about may not fall into this human labor replacement category, but the underlying technologies are essentially the same.