@CarbonBasedEvolution: Recently, I've been reflecting on the fact that what our generation considers a "normal society" is actually just a 63-year historical anomaly that lasted from 1945 to 2008.
The massive middle class and office white-collar workers across the globe, buying homes and supporting families on stable salaries, and achieving upward social mobility through education—this lifestyle is not the historical norm.
It was built on the simultaneous existence of several rare conditions: high profits from industrial capital, a post-war global competitive vacuum, demographic and energy dividends, the welfare state, universal education, and a pace of technological diffusion slower than the speed of institutional adjustment.
The industrial era was able to support a massive middle class because machines primarily replaced physical labor while creating a vast number of organizational mental-labor jobs.
But the AI era is different. It is beginning to directly compress "standardized cognitive labor" itself. Programmers, copywriters, customer service, legal assistants, financial analysts, and administrative coordinators—these once-typical middle-class jobs are becoming increasingly easy to automate.
The Industrial Revolution shifted humans from physical to mental labor. The AI Revolution, however, is causing "ordinary mental labor" itself to depreciate. Therefore, what we are facing is perhaps not "future uncertainty," but rather the end of that 63-year golden age of the middle class.
Future social structures may once again resemble the historical norm: a small minority controlling capital, technology, and platforms; a vast number of low-bargaining-power service workers; and an increasingly thin middle layer.
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