Instead of outright replacing entire roles, AI is more likely to cause significant wage compression. As AI makes certain skills more common, it floods the labor supply for those tasks, driving down pay for both displaced workers and incumbents in affected fields.

AI makes 'yesterday's expert competence' cheap, leading to an abundance of decent but generic outputs (e.g., code, essays). This devalues standard work and increases demand for true experts who can add nuance, create systems, or produce something genuinely novel that stands out.

Previous technological shifts primarily automated low-skill jobs, widening inequality. AI, however, is poised to replace or augment tasks done by high-earning knowledge workers. This could lead to a compression of the wage distribution, a reversal of historical trends driven by technology.

The drive for AI efficiency is eliminating entry-level jobs, breaking the traditional apprenticeship model. This dynamic risks creating a future deficit of skilled experts ("verifiers") needed to manage complex AI systems, while simultaneously accumulating hidden systemic risks.

The threat of AI is not mass unemployment but a radical redefinition of work. By automating tasks and collapsing the cost of essentials like housing and energy, AI will free humanity from the necessity of 'jobs,' allowing a shift toward a portfolio of creative and problem-solving activities.

The primary danger of AI is not job replacement but the outsourcing of core human skills like deep thinking, creativity, and communication. As with any outsourced capability, this leads to the atrophy of our cognitive functions, mirroring how physical tools made us physically weaker.

The fear of AI-driven mass unemployment is a classic economic fallacy. Like past technologies, AI is a tool that raises the marginal productivity of individual workers. More productive workers don't work less; they take on more ambitious projects and create new kinds of jobs, increasing the overall demand for labor.

Capitalism values scarcity. AI's core disruption is not just automating tasks, but making human-like intellectual labor so abundant that its market value approaches zero. This breaks the fundamental economic loop of trading scarce labor for wages.

The fear of AI in the workplace has evolved. The initial concern was that AI would directly replace jobs. The more modern, subtler threat being pushed by consultants is that people skilled in using AI will replace those who are not, shifting the focus from technological displacement to individual skill gaps.