I think he makes some real good points and observations. Many of those further down in the article than in the few paragraphs I posted here. If his thinking is correct, we're going to have some major issues. Merlin and I used to have some conversations about the need for Universal Basic Income. If AI takes many jobs, that may become a necessary reality.

Just Know that AI Will Obliterate White Collar Jobs

Though Denial Can Be Fun

There’s a chorus of “thought leaders” arguing that AI will not replace managers. The Harvard Business Review is leading the charge with a suite of articles that insist that AI will not replace human decision makers and that AI “will enable knowledge workers to concentrate on value-adding activities where human expertise is indispensable” (Senz, 2023). De Cremer and Kasparov (2021) argue that “AI should augment human intelligence, not replace it.” Martela and Luoma (2021) flat out declare that “AI will never replace managers” because humans are better at “reframing” problems than machines — at least for now.

Other HBR articles suggest that too much focus on AI can actually cause “more problems than it’s solving” (Acar, 2024), and Shrier (2023) describes the jobs most and least affected by AI with the simple title “is your job AI resilient?” Finally, Lakhani (2023) argues that “AI won’t replace humans — but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” These are clever, nuanced “interpretations” of what’s happening that make good reading, though one always wonders if the ideas would stand the source test: if HBR’s arguments appeared in the Forgotten Business Review would they be taken as seriously?

The general conclusion is that humans with all their uniqueness need not worry too much about losing their jobs to algorithms, and that AI will remain assistants rather than partners and certainly not bosses — which is like deciding that an employee will remain in his or her job forever no matter how well he or she performs. When you think about the reasoning, it just makes no sense. It doesn’t account for where “AI” will be in five years (let alone ten), or how process modeling and mining will welcome AI across the enormous world of well-bounded, repetitive tasks that define the vast majority of things knowledge workers actually do all day.

The argument that AI will “free” humans to focus on higher level tasks assumes that humans are capable of focusing on higher level tasks Where’s the evidence for that assumption?

More here:
https://medium.com/@SteveAndriole/just-know-that-ai-will-obliterate-white-collar-jobs-18b5faaf8896