"Add the impact of automation to the effects of existing elite overproduction and the result will be that the upheaval to come will be steered by a very large “officer class” — angry, effective, efficient, a “counter-elite” (to borrow another term from Turchin) looking to transform the social order of which, under happier circumstances, it would have been a mainstay. 

"Some people argue (correctly) that humanity has been able to weather earlier episodes of technological transformation and will do so again.  But they need to rebut the argument that this metamorphosis — the replacement of “brain” — really is, as none other than Charles Murray has insisted, different. 

"Past is not always prologue: Google, that colossus of our time, now employs more than 60,000 people worldwide, still considerably fewer than the 80,000 who worked for General Motors in or around Flint, Mich., alone, in the mid 1950s. But, needless to say, Google now is not strictly comparable with Flint then--con't below