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Your subtext mostly seemed like sneering at these people "I have finance friends I talk to who still say their jobs can't be automated at all with AI" and AI at large, so yes it did cause everyone to respond poorly, because you came across poorly.
Some predictions:
Your finance friends are idiots
white collar work is going to get a huge step change in productivity, and many paradigms will shift across e-commerce and information work as a result. It's hard to fathom how, but agent-to-agent interactions will be levered in many ways. Aside from just making email jobs faster.
What happens to white collar work as a result of this step change is anyone's guess. It depends on Jevons' Paradox, the elasticity of demand for white collar services, and the latent demand for white collar work in our society. Also somewhat rate limited by all our social systems, for example, if lawyers get 10x as productive and demand for legal services simply rises by 10x to meet it, our legal system implodes, so we have big changes ahead! Accounting is a good example. Excel made accountants more productive, but then as a society we chose to consume accounting that is WAY more complicated instead of having less accountants do the same amount of accounting.
I was initially expecting the white collar labour market/productivity situation to start getting weird this year, but its almost 50% of the way through the year and $LARGE_MULTINATIONAL_FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION still hasn't given me Codex or Claude Cowork (genuinely embarrassing...) but my hodge-podge of skills and "open 30 chatGPT tabs to ghetto parallelize" is already changing my output materially.
Once white collar workers have ample access to a Codex or Claude Cowork tier harness with ~Mythos tier base models, shit is going to get freaky for white collar workers unless there is a HUGE increase in the demand for information work.
There is an absurd amount of productivity untapped in simply using the tools we have better, let alone the fact they are getting measurably better month over month. ChatGPT was noticeably shittier at using excel in early march 2026 than it is today (pre 5.4).
The roll-out of 5 and 6 will take way longer than I think, because institutions are SO slow. And all the idiots like your friends (and you?) who refuse to embrace these tools cause diffusion to slow. But once the snowball starts, it'll be sink or swim for those not adopting quickly, and that will speed up roll-out, one way or another.
I have no predictions on robots/autonomous cars, but podcasters I trust keep saying robots are quite far away still, which is super lame.
I don’t expect demand for human work to expand indefinitely as there are often no benefits to expanding them. If everyone starts suing for trivial things, eventually there’s no benefits to be had if every I.e paper cut or hurt feeling can be sued over. Add in that the system itself will tamp down just to get stability (how much insurance would a business need if even the slightest problem results in a lawsuit, and how long until laws are tightened to prevent that?). And as for accounting and other forms of analytics, I don’t think you have infinite demand simply because after a certain level of detail, you capture so much noise that it adds no information, or at least no useful information. Walmart might be able to determine exactly how much rain must fall in a given area to depress sales .001%. It’s not very useful, and when coupled with dozens of other potential factors, teasing out that from “car accidents in nearby roads”, “squirrel chews power lines”, “local sports all team on a losing streak”, and on to dozens of other potential factors for depressed sales (few of which can be predicted or acted upon) it’s just not worth gathering or collating that data. Jevon’s law in my view probably has a curve at some point. We just aren’t there yet.
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