Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Corporations that over-hired over the past 10 years needed an excuse to cut the layers of fat and bureaucracy out, and AI came along at just the right time. It doesn’t matter if AI is increasing productivity; what matters is that people think it might be.

Maybe…

I dunno. Anyone who’s been at a big company (the kind that are inclined to over-hire) can attest to the massive population of folks who don’t seem to have any productive job. Does AI spell doom for those people? I have no idea, their job wasn’t to be productive in the first place. Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle managers fiefdom—that is not a job that can be taken by AI, right?

I guess maybe just engineering jobs are on the chopping block. Doomed, by the nature of their productivity actually being tangible, to be replaced by an AI that does their job worse.