Post by Counterpoint

AI will take all the jobs. We've heard this before.
In 1811, English weavers smashed the looms they believed would leave them without work. In the 1960s, the US government set up a national commission to study whether automation would cause mass unemployment. When ATMs arrived, people expected bank tellers to disappear. Every time, the jobs changed, and new ones appeared that nobody had predicted.
One side: This is a panic we've lived through many times. Technology removes tasks, not whole professions. It makes work cheaper and more productive, which creates demand somewhere else. The people predicting the end of work have been wrong for two hundred years, so why would they be right now?
The other side: Earlier machines replaced muscle. This one goes after judgment, writing, analysis, and code, the work we moved into when the machines took the old jobs. It's also spreading in months rather than decades. Even if new jobs appear eventually, "eventually" doesn't help a translator or a junior analyst whose job is gone this year. And it's the entry-level roles, where people used to learn the trade, that are going first.
Maybe both are true. The total number of jobs may survive, while the path into them doesn't.
So which is it: another false alarm, or the first time the alarm is real?
Give your reason, not just your side.