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Let's talk about the Jobpocalyse. I feel like much of the discourse comes from abstracted 'thinkers', who are already independently elite, wealthy or both, and plugged deeply into the discourse. Or it comes from rootless circles -> young tech-adjacent (or at least tech competent) terminally online people without too much to lose anyway.
I live in the center of middle-class striver-ism. If we disrupt the job market in such a short time (anything less than 5 years), even in the most well executed UBI transition scheme, I don't see how it isn't anything but apolocyptic. There's no preserving the social order. I think we'll get suicide on extreme levels. Whether it's virtuous or not, I don't think that you can tell the middle class "every sunk cost you've ever made in your life has been worthless" and have them take it on the chin.
And yet, I see no real effort to address anything like this, so I'll just live like everyone else, and assume it's not real. Whether my life as I know it is fucked or not, is orthogonal to whether I destroy myself with stress in the meantime.
And stuff like that viral blog's - get your financial house in order, anything beyond general good advice, is not really helpful to folks in the middle of life. If 1/2 your neighborhood gets laid off inside 18 months, whether you squeezed an extra few grand into a mutual fund is going to be less than irrelevant. YOLO is probably better advice. Whether that means, make big gambles now because hey, there's every chance the board will be cleared anyway if you lose, or if that means enjoy the normalcy LARP while you have time left, and don't suffocate it with preparing for a future you can't predict
My expectation (feel free to call it "hope" or "cope") is that these changes happen both faster and slower than we expect. You've hit on "faster", but on the slower side automating whole industries has very long tails and lots of awkward corners that move slowly. The spreadsheet eliminated rooms of accountants "running the numbers" with adding machines. The Roomba was invented decades ago, but my employer still has custodians and people still hire housekeeping services. I have pictures of my great grandfather on strike for a union that no longer exists, nor does the entire profession (beyond vestigial artesanal practice), but he still lived to retire somewhat comfortably.
Part of this is just institutional friction: see the quite about science moving forward when retirements/funerals happen. I don't see the average mid-level PHB deciding to voluntarily shrink their teams to use AI instead; that's just not how corporate budgeting works, although maybe new startups will structure things differently and gradually change whole industries.
Correct that the team shrinking won't be voluntary, it will be forced from on high by corporate leadership. They can make up a percentage of people who must be let go for each department. And it is so.
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Voluntarily is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When the guy who killed Merrill Lynch, a bank that survived the great depression, can walk away with $165 million in compensation, we're at the point where incentive alignment at the top is as close to opaque as you can get.
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