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Greetings from the real economy. I’m Steve Lohr, a tech reporter for The Times, and I tend to focus on the effects of technology beyond Silicon Valley. No question, the Valley is a wellspring of innovation and home to the ascendant digital corporate giants, both feared and admired. But it’s just a sliver of the $20 trillion American economy.

Technology is only a tool in service of greater ends, and those ends presumably extend beyond creating billionaires and enriching investors. The larger agenda, in economic terms, includes growth, productivity, living standards and jobs.

Let’s take one of those economic ingredients — jobs.

Forecasts of technology’s impact on jobs run the spectrum from apocalyptic to sanguine, depending largely on the pace of progress in artificial intelligence. But there is a consistency to the serious research on the coming course of automation: In the near term, occupations are more likely to be transformed by digital technology than destroyed by it.