All we have is guesses and speculation as to what technologies will or won't be available at any point in the future. If I propose an idea you might think it to be a preposterous one, or undoab
I guess I wasn't clear enough. The point was to examine some of the real world example of what people do at work today.
Right now, the vast majority of people's works consist of repetitive, mundane tasks. A lot of people who think about automation picture the story you linked. Something far in the future, with humanoid androids and scifi technology. A lot of people opposing the basic income on principle and trotting out the luddite fallacy to defend their position have no idea that automation will put a lot of us out of work long before we have technology like that.
Take your average retail place like walmart, for example. You don't need a person to stock a shelf. The store could be overhauled to completely cut people out of the receiving and stocking process. It's possible to cut not only the human cashiers out of the equation, but the entire concept of checkout lines out of the equation, if they so choose. The only current barrier to that is the cost to implement it.
Frontline tech-support and phone customer service will be cut out of the equation in the next couple of years. Speech recognition is almost where it needs to be to pull the trigger, and the employees doing the work are already working off of a script. They're basically just filling the role of speech recognition interface software right now, that's it. Computers will replace the frontline tech support, and handle the initial round of troubleshooting before passing the harder calls onto human case managers. Five or ten years after the front line people go, the algorithms will handle the case management too.
None of that requires scifi level tech and these are just a couple of the jobs which will start feeling the pressure very soon (potentially even faster with the minimum wage debates heating up). The general public doesn't really seem to understand how close things are to fundamentally changing in the job market. Technology is actively working to eliminate a huge number of rote positions, and as labor costs go up, the financial incentive pushing innovation only increases.