Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, autom

Another thing we never had before is the huge skill differential between the jobs that will be automated away and the jobs that replace them. In the past, automation created new jobs that were higher-skilled, but still relatively easy for any of the displaced workforce to upskill to. E.g. if a machine replaced the work you did manually, it was not too difficult to learn to operate that machine. But with AI the skills gap is huge. Taking software engineering as an example, previously a motivated bootcamp graduate could start churning out basic CRUD apps and be useful. Now a motivated senior engineer with AI agents could churn out an app a day. So the minimum useful skill-level is now at the level of a senior engineer. And this is possible because of yet another thing we never had before: A "universal" knowledge worker machine. Knowledge work was "safe" because it was a relatively high-skill category and automation was only possible through software, which was expensive and slow to build, largely due to a shortage of software developers. Now we potentially don't even need software for a huge range of cognitive tasks! Of course, the stochastic nature of AI probably means we will be writing software for a long time yet, but as above, existing (senior) developers can scale themselves up much, much faster.