How about this? Circa 1980, I was working for IBM and was introduced to something called SQL which we were just starting to sell as a programmer productivity aid. It was pricey, because you needed a separate system and disk drives to support it. But we did demos where we would take tapes of several of a client's flat files, load them into tables, then invite the management team in to ask questions of their data. The management loved it because they could get immediate answers they had been waiting for weeks or months from their data processing people. However, the IT people hated it, because they saw it as a threat to their job security. Lots of hours were spent writing and debugging extraction programs and sorts to produce even simple reports, and the people doing that didn't WANT to be freed up to tackle more challenging assignments. The lesson I carried away from that was that routine tasks are always going to candidates for automation, but problem solving and analysis skills will always be in demand.