I like that you picked those two because they happen to be two that are already disappearing.

Search engines have been fighting SEO for years. And they have pretty much won. SEO was a hot industry just a few years ago, and is already disappearing.

And social media specialization of marketing and PR was taken on by very young people and thought to be a special skill, until recently. But already businesses have figured out that there is nothing special about it. And every marketer is expected to be a social media expert. It's not creating more new jobs, it's just adding those skills to existing jobs.

It's tempting to think that it's different this time, but it probably isn't.

I am sorry, but to me that argument sounds just like the future will be the same as the past. It's not exactly wrong, it's just an intellectually lazy argument to make.

Just one example of this time it's different is the income split between labor and capital. Historically it had been fixed at 70/30. This is across all industries, and all nations, since the industrial revolution. But now labor's share is down to just 62%. And that's happening in places like China and Mexico too, so it can't be simply due to offshoring. Source: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588900...

Secondly, the number of jobs and job titles is entirely arbitrary.

That's not at all true. Automation has always created unemployment. There was no such thing as 3rd world before the industrial revolution. The economies of countries like China and India, which realized on a lot of textile production, collapsed when the industrial revolution took off in the UK. The UK exported both goods and unemployment. And what we call the 3rd world was brought into existence. We are seeing a very similar process today with Germany and the Southern belt of the EU. Germany too is exporting both its product and its unemployment.

If the advance of technology was truly putting people out of work, don't you think it would be evident by now?

Yes, I do. But I don't think we'd see the unemployment rate go up. I am sure we'll first see labor's share of income drop, and wages should stagnate. Which is quite similar to what we are indeed seeing right now.

The difference is that, once upon a time, we redefined "job" and "full-time" to balance between the economy's actual need for labor and humane living standards that allowed for active citizenship. We reduced the work-week and redefined a worker's life as involving more leisure, because our technology allowed us to do that.

These days, unemployment is high and labor participation is falling because technology has advanced, but we still expect the same work time. The result? A bifurcation of the labor market into a broad section of underemployed, unemployed, or just plain low-paid unskilled and semi-skilled workers, and a small cadre of overemployed professionals now working more than they ever previously did.

Stop trying to pretend the problem isn't there, and let's just fix it.