Definitely, the problem is that companies need less of them, just like a construction company opening roads with machinery, or an automated factory.

Doesn't matter, if the number of position keeps shrinking so will our job prospects.

I'm a freelancing consultant since 5 years, I've had 2 major customers now for 3+ years. I have a very good pulse of the market: being good, or being even very good and being among those that brings AI and automation to organizations will not save our jobs.

In fact, AI has sped up so much the work that 2 out of 5 people in my current team are being let go: I find it absurd, our productivity has more than doubled over the last years and we've made ourselves redundant. Money is money, I'm on one side making non-tech workers redundant (people whose job was menial boring office stuff), and building the systems that will make myself redundant.

I read the "imagination" as prelude to "Jevon's paradox" for AI. It might be that we simply don't know yet what using AI fully means, and where else it can be used and how. Electricity was initially just for lighting, but now it's everywhere...

This doesn't scale, because like in a factory that gets replaced by robots, or in a supermarket with self checkouts, not everyone gets to save their job, regardless.

Also, the increase in output is meaningless when the amount of customers doesn't scale in similar size.

Then there are the constraints of physics, there are so many humans in the planet that actually want to pay for a specific product, or consulting services.

I'm sorry if a factual statement makes you unhappy.

I'd go beyond that and say they need to overhaul their culture and mode of operation. Math needs to be even more collective than it is today, without focus on ego reward and priority. They were already steps in this direction before this year's AI detonation: net-enabled collaboration, first informally and then with Lean formalization. Perhaps there should be a de-emphasis on naming things after people.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis?