Agreed. AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future. They finally see automation as dangerous because no one will need their opinion or their recall any more. The working class were already automated to death (and the opinion-havers cheered it on), because their working class opinions hasn't been taken into consideration since Taylor and Ford figured out that we can eliminate individual knowledge in physical work and push that knowledge upwards into the institution itself. They can just lay you off and train some new ones, and the new hires will have a worse contract than you had.

The reason working people's jobs haven't been automated away is because people are cheaper and more conscientious than robots. Even worse, the robots are owned by famous rent-seekers who see you as prey, so defending yourself against the robots as a customer adds to the overhead of choosing them. How do you know it's not going to cost you 10x as much to fix/update them as it cost you last year? You don't, because you were locked into a scammer who unilaterally decided to raise rates on you or the entire industry, or simply got in over their head and shut down, leaving you without a vendor. Minimum wage employees don't do that.

Now asking some dipshit McKinsey consultant or some social media expert for 10 ideas to increase sales? LLMs can give you 100, summarize them, and rank them with references. They are only getting better at this. We criticize them because they only give us a list of obvious answers, but the reason we hire recent graduates is for them to give us the list of obvious answers they learned while being educated in their specialty. "Creativity" gets assigned to whoever has the social capital to be seen as a legitimate and worthy "creative," or, more accurately, the person with the money either chooses somebody to run the show who they suspect has a magic secret formula or aura, or they take on that identity themselves.

That white collar middle-class magic is gone. People who could do difficult arithmetic quickly used to make a lot of money, too.

> No political force will fight for onshoring services jobs or incorporating barriers to reduce automation in most white collar jobs.

Only people who get protection would be the ones that are unified enough to have the institutions to launder cash to give to politicians. Doctors, realtors, etc.

> AI looks to be a war between professional opinion-havers and fact-rememberers and the future

I disagree. I personally think SWEs (who are what most people think of as tech bros), accountants, back-office roles, and others are at the upper economic tier of society now - as wage and educational data has clearly shown.

These are the roles most at risk for automation, not because jobs will be 100% automated, but because automation now exists to reduce headcount by 20-30% and still generate the same output. This is what already happened in skilled trades over the last 40 years.