The cope of “replaced by AI”

I saw this tweet going viral:

There is a recurring theme of people predicting and hoping “such-and-such professions” will be replaced or obsoleted by AI. Common examples include:

–White-collar jobs
–Mathematicians
–Writers
–elite degrees/higher-ed

Each of these were addressed in earlier posts, in which so far I have been correct.

Some people outright lie to push their “AI obsolescence” narrative. For example, a recent viral article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic, “Time to Consider Becoming a Bricklayer,” goes so far as to claim that “…AI is threatening to make thinking work obsolete,” and that “…hard data are showing that generative artificial intelligence really is smashing the lower rungs on the white-collar career ladder.”

I don’t know what data she is referring to. Why do people keep lying to their readers when anything can be fact-checked in seconds with AI? I consulted Claude, and the truth is much more nuanced, and more optimistic. There is, in fact, no evidence of the ladder being smashed. Below are screenshots from that conversation:

And

So I think that settles it. It’s way premature, if not unfounded, to claim that white-collar jobs or the college wage premium are going away. To claim otherwise comes off as “cope,” which I define as beliefs people hold, or tell themselves, that fly in the face of reality, either to fit a narrative or to reconcile their own mediocrity.

As with Taleb, success in academia largely eluded him. His books were popular with a large online audience, but his “Black Swan” and “fat tail” concepts were ignored by academics. Statisticians and economists have long known that Gaussian risk models underestimate tail risk, and that people tend to underestimate the likelihood of unforeseen events. What seemed profound to the general public was met with collective indifference by the actual experts. That may have bred resentment: if you can’t succeed in academia, watching AI destroy it is a bittersweet revenge