For decades, manufacturing has become more and more automated with fewer and fewer workers at the plant where the product is produced. Picture a world where future iPhones are designed in Silicon Valley with engineers working in a fully communicative fashion from their homes anyplace in the world.

The components would then be produced in automated factories in many locations and their outputs would be automatically sent to various locations for final and totally automated assembly and then shipped by self-driving vehicles so the first time a human hand touches the phone is when the customer opens the package in her home. This is not a world decades off, but only a few years away.

When Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884) invented the mechanical reaper in 1831, there was fear that millions of farmers would lose their jobs (at the time something like 80 percent of the population worked on farms).

But as farm automation grew and the price of crops continued to fall in real terms, as they are still doing, those who were displaced obtained, for the most part, better jobs in the new industrial economy.

This process continues to the present, where a single farmer, using automated equipment, genetically improved seeds, and precision fertilizer, can operate a very large farm controlled by computers in his home and produce enough food to support thousands of families.

The educational establishment has been resisting technology for eons - and so like Socrates two and half thousand years ago, there is a teacher or professor who stands in front of a few students attempting to impart knowledge.