High-skills workers are in trouble too.

I remember reading a story recently about a young man who was training to be a snowplow operator. When asked why he chose this particular job, he replied, "Because it can't be done from Bangalore."

Hospitals--particularly small to medium ones--used to have a problem if X-rays or other scans needed to be read during the overnight hours. In most cases, patients were told that they would need to wait until the radiologist came in in the morning. A true emergency meant rousing the radiologist from their bed.

Then came the internet. Now hospitals, in the middle of the night, can have scans read by a radiologist somewhere else in the world where it is the middle of the day. The scans are transmitted in digital form to the radiologist on another continent.

The NY Times recently ran a story concerning software that was putting lawyers out of work. In complicated lawsuits, with many boxes of documents to be examined, junior associates of law firms would normally spend (and bill) hundreds of hours for plowing through the documents.

Not anymore. Software has been developed which can do the same job resulting in the need for fewer lawyers.

How about pilots? Certainly a highly-skilled occupation. Newspapers recently carried stories about pilots losing some of their skills because modern passenger aircraft can takeoff, fly and land without any intervention from the pilot. Pilots are getting too little "hands on" flying, and coming up rusty when emergencies occur. The public, however, is unlikely to be willing to board a plane with an empty cockpit.

A few months ago, network news carried a story about a decreasing need for pilots in our Air Force. Rapidly expanding drone technology could be applied to aircraft that are now manned allowing us to remotely fly fighter jets, keeping expensively-trained pilots far from harm.

Yesterday's Washington Post carried a story about combining the capability of planes to fly themselves with facial recognition software. Drones would be aloft, flying on their own, while searching for faces of approved targets. When a target is acquired, the only human action required is approval of the shot.

It isn't just those with low skills who are in trouble in today's job market.