Knowledge Age is Making Current Job Losses Permanent

I was reading an article from the Economist entitled: Difference Engine: Luddite legacy. The basic premise is that the rapid technology advances occurring after the industrial age began is having an increasing impact on the job market.  They aren't talking about robots taking automotive workers jobs, as discussed in a BI review, but technologies leveraged by the knowledge worker of today's economy that makes manual operations performed by the industrial worker obsolete.  The below sums up this concept:

This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete. 

This is unlike the job destruction and creation that has taken place continuously since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as machines gradually replaced the muscle-power of human labourers and horses. Today, automation is having an impact not just on routine work, but on cognitive and even creative tasks as well. A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees. 

That makes a huge, disruptive difference. Not only is AI software much cheaper than mechanical automation to install and operate, there is a far greater incentive to adopt it—given the significantly higher cost of knowledge workers compared with their blue-collar brothers and sisters in the workshop, on the production line, at the check-out and in the field.

The key point which I agree with is that these job losses are permanent.  We have learned to live without these functions now and don't see a need to go back and incur greater labor costs when our systems are performing adequately.  The greatest opportunity for knowledge workers and their businesses exist with organizations that rely on the old "brick and mortar" industrial age approach in conducting their business. As they face ever increasing pressures to compete and become ever more effective in their efforts they will need to embrace knowledge age solutions.  The question is whether they wait to long to recognize that the industrial age is behind them.