AI threatens specialists more than generalists, and employees of large companies more than small ones.
So if your whole day is writing marketing copy for X product in a large company, yes, your job is going to be threatened. The company made you a machine, so you are easily replaced by a machine.
If your job is in a small company, writing marketing copy, doing layout, sending stuff to the printer, submitting receipts, and packing and shipping on occasion...AI will have an extremely hard time competing.
You mentioned the bank and the factory. Who maintains the plant? Who keeps the toilets clean? Who takes out the trash? Stocks the break room?
Moms and dads know that you don't have to be the most efficient and everything...you just have to be tolerably good at a lot of things that are both intellectual and physical.
I see it as the opposite. We look for specialists and are firing generalists. if a person is a specialist in just "has memorized stuff", they lose the job, but if specialist is "knows stuff and stuff around that stuff", they are indispensable and get a higher pay.
and employees of large companies more than small ones.
Yes
Not really - this would be multiple agentic AI with different agents for each of these different tasks, residing in cloud environments communicating via APIs and using the same data.
maintenance can be automated and is being automated in new plants. the same for "takes out the trash" and "stocks the break room"
True. The thing is that the level of "tolerably good" is now going to be higher.
But this is no different than in 1850 or 1990