Dwarkesh had a good interview with Zuck the other week. And in it, Zuck had an interesting example (that I'm going to butcher):
FB has long wanted to have a call center for its ~3.5B users. But that call center would automatically be the largest in history and cost ~15B/yr to run. Something that is cost ineffective in the extreme. But, with FB's internal AIs, they're starting to think that a call center may be feasible. Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. Then, with the harder calls, you can actually route it to a human.
So, to me, this is a great example of how the interaction of new tech and labor is a fractal not a hierarchy. In that, with each new tech that your specific labor sector finds, you get this fractalization of the labor in the end. Zuck would have never thought of a call center, denying the labor of many people. But this new tech allows for a call center that looks a lot like the old one, just with only the hard problems. It's smaller, yes, but it looks the same and yet is slightly different (hence a fractal).
Look, I'm not going to argue that tech is disruptive. But what I am arguing is that tech makes new jobs (most of the time), it's just that these new jobs tend to be dealing with much harder problems. Like, we''re pushing the boundaries here, and that boundary gets more fractal-y, and it's a more niche and harder working environment for your brain. The issue, of course, is that, like a grad student, you have to trust in the person working at the boundary is actually doing work and not just blowing smoke. That issue, the one of trust, I think is the key issue to 'solve'. Cal Newport talks a lot about this now and how these knowledge worker tasks really don't do much for a long time, and then they have these spats of genius. It's a tough one, and not an intellectual enterprise, but an emotional one.