Here's one honest counterweight — and I mean counterweight, not a pillow to hide under.
If 90% of workers lost their income overnight, who's left to buy the products that make the tech giants rich? The consumer economy is the other half of the machine. Mass, instant unemployment is economically self-defeating at the scale of a whole society — so a total overnight wipeout is genuinely unlikely, and ordinary demand does brake the worst of the sci-fi.
But hold both halves of this honestly:
- True: policy, unions and plain politics may slow some cuts, and the big aggregate numbers can look "fine" while specific roles quietly bleed out.
- False comfort: that your job therefore can't vanish; that your employer won't try hard to cut the cost of each task; that "wait and see" is free. It isn't — it just leaves you unprepared while someone else learns the tools.
My honest read on the likely shape of it: churn (roles reshaped, teams shrunk, new jobs appearing somewhere else), polarisation (people who use AI well pulling away from people priced out of the old tasks), and geographic unevenness (advanced economies feeling the office-work squeeze first, global outsourcing shifting underneath it).
Concern is supposed to move you — learn, use, own where you can. It shouldn't freeze you, and it definitely shouldn't get waved away with "ah, it'll be fine."
Continue — what to actually do with all this.