I completely understand the fear of AI replacing most white-collar jobs. The thing that makes me more optimistic is that people forget just how many such jobs the rise of the computer and internet have already destroyed. Much of white collar work already disappeared, and recently! See... -File clerks. I was one of them! We had to punch holes in paper, put things in three-ring binders, and find the right place to put stuff on a shelf. There was a whole division doing this in the REIT I worked in. - Mail Room. This was the proverbial "from the bottom" job in 20th century movies about office life. Look at the movies and these things were packed with people, they pushed memos up and down the office food chain. Largely gone. -Copyists. Largely before my time, so pre-computer, but a huge number of people just copying and recopying memos and papers on typewriters for different folders. One of the most significant jobs in America. - Have you ever heard of a typing pool? A variation on copyists, but people who just took everything handwritten and typed it on a typewriter and typed new versions out for other people. Every big company had one. --Computer, yes, the human kind. All of those "hidden figures" in movies and books came from a massive number of people just typing and retyping numbers into adding machines. This actually includes most of what old fashioned "accountants" did too. -Data Entry. Later, but many people including me, spent months taking numbers people wrote on pieces of paper and typing them into a physical computer. Now much rarer. -There were weird jobs too like newspaper clipper. Whole firms just looked through newspapers and clipped relevant stories for people who paid them to do so. I know AI is different in so many ways, and it really could destroy millions of jobs without any substitute. But if you had told anybody, say, from the 1980s, that most of the above jobs would be gone in 40 years, they would rightfully have told you that was most of the white-collar workforce. The truth is it's really hard to imagine what new things come along or which existing things grow. That doesn't mean those things will come along this time (as the investor slogan says, past performance does not guarantee future results), but it is good reminder.