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@ Satoshis Nephew
2025-05-05 14:11:45
The Death of the Bell Curve: Middle-Out Disruption
Every previous wave of automation displaced labor according to a U-shaped curve: it destroyed low-skill and high-skill jobs but largely spared the middle.
Factory automation eliminated manual laborers but created maintenance technicians. Office computerization removed filing clerks but generated IT support roles.
Even software devoured routine tasks while creating new categories of knowledge work to manage increasingly complex systems. Artificial intelligence inverts this pattern entirely.
It flattens the middle first. It begins not with janitors and CEOs but with the vast ocean of middle-class knowledge workers - the emailers, the spreadsheet modelers, the presentation creators, the UX researchers, the proposal writers, the social media strategists, the associate attorneys, the financial planners, the project managers, the mid-level marketers, the human resources coordinators.
Because that's where the pattern density is highest. That's where work has been most thoroughly digitized, documented, and standardized. That's where output can be most clearly defined, measured, and optimized. That's where the training data is richest, most structured, and most accessible.
The "average" knowledge worker has now become the most vulnerable. They are highly paid, highly scripted, and highly replaceable. Their value derives not from rare genius or specialized physical skill but from consistent execution of well-defined processes - precisely the kind of work that generative AI excels at replicating. Their workflows have been codified in process documentation and training materials.
Their meetings recorded in vast digital archives. Their emails stored in searchable databases. Their presentations standardized according to corporate templates. Their customer interactions logged in CRM systems. Their code committed to repositories with detailed documentation.
Their entire professional history has been transformed into training data for the very systems that will ultimately render them obsolete. They represent the first harvest of the age of simulation.
And most remain unaware that the harvest has begun. They still believe they're protected because their work requires a "human touch." They still think their positions are secure because they involve "critical thinking" or "creativity" or "emotional intelligence."
They don't realize that these qualities have already been parameterized, that the simulations are already good enough for the purposes of capital, that the gap between human performance and machine approximation is closing not because the machine is becoming more human but because the tolerance for humanity in professional settings has been systematically reduced for decades.
The hollowing out of the professional middle class won't announce itself with mass layoffs and sudden displacements. That would provoke resistance, regulation, possibly even revolution. Instead, it manifests as wage stagnation despite productivity gains. As "restructuring" that eliminates positions through attrition.
As the quiet proliferation of automation tools that replace tasks so gradually that by the time workers realize their roles have been mostly automated, it's too late to adapt.
This is not creative destruction in the Schumpeterian sense. It's creative absorption - the seamless integration of human labor into machine systems that mimic just enough of our capabilities to render us economically superfluous, one function at a time.
#AI #BITCOIN #REALVALUE #CHANGE
THE GREAT HARVEST - ADAM LIVINGSTON