Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

The general folly I see in these types of discussions is that people believe that we must fix these things because in the mid 20th century we reached a relatively great state with broad-based prosperity (at least in the West), and so obviously we'll fix our problems because otherwise we'd backslide to a worse state.

Sorry to be a pessimist, but progress is not guaranteed. I see the mid twentieth century as largely an anomaly in human history. Going forward, I see wealth concentration continuing to accelerate, with a widening gulf between classes that control the means of production and everyone else, which due to technological advancement will make a lot of people's labor much less profitable. Basically, a reversion to a more feudal system, where there is essentially an aristocratic class that hoards and lives off its previous wealth, and pretty much everyone else living at a subsistence level. Think Ireland in the early 1800s (not necessarily that level of absolute deprivation, but same level of relative deprivation compared to the land owners).

The reason I see this as the most probable outcome is when I hear people talk about "raise wages to march global productivity" or "democratize ownership", I don't see any rationale as to how or why that would happen. Do you think the people in control will just give that away from the goodness of their hearts? There is literally no economic or social reason to expect this to happen. It's clear that democracies can be successfully manipulated into "blaming the boogeyman", so I don't think the democratic process will bring about these changes.

Happy to hear a rational argument to the contrary, but my primary point is that I rarely hear any argument about how we get to there from here.

I agree with all of this, and frankly it has me terrified for the future of humanity. With enough AI and automation you don't even need other humans, just the resources to hoard more means of production. The only rational argument I have for how we get somewhere else, is eventually once we start hitting the end game of resource accumulation someone's going to start launching nukes and the destruction of technology will send us back to a time when other humans actually mattered. A bit optimistic, I know.

I agree with your points over all, but lacking a complete "rational argument", I'd just like to outline a few ideas that I'm still working on, and while not a complete fulfillment of your desire for a map from here to there, might be a starting place for ideas. Like you, I see the seeds of a potentially dark future--but maybe it isn't our fate just yet.

I'd start with changing what and how we measure. A move away from single-dimension variables like GDP and simplistic closed-form calculations like the Black-Scholes formula and all it led us to believe.

If we agree simple-but-wrong metrics are bad, then we can (I believe) move towards simulations--not "my simulation" nor "your simulation", but ways to talk about beliefs and outcomes. I think the future will involve AI-assisted computable discussions, where multiple variables and the ability to dynamically incorporate or exclude assumptions from opposing perspectives will lead us to some shared agreement and mutually beneficial outcomes (while allowing for many areas where people will continue to disagree).

I'd propose next that we continue to raise the prominence of evidence showing how cooperation is often better than competition. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom spent her life identifying systems and methods of cooperation. She proposes, "We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies [e.g. of the commons] nor free of moral responsibility."

Robert Axelrod ran simulations on the iterated prisoner's dilemma and concluded, "forgiveness, cooperation, and reputation" are a stable strategy in most real-world conditions.

Strong ideologies that promote extreme individualism, marketed as scientifically sound, deserve great skepticism IMO, and should be treated with the same wariness as two missionaries knocking on your door.

If you accept the statement: "poverty causes violence", and "wealthy people (ultimately) cause others to be poor (which I can admit is a tenuous claim, but I think many people would agree, at least in certain cases), then all "violent revolution/rebellion" is is a redistribution of suffering, bringing it back to those who caused it.

It's an incredibly murky train of logic though. Most wealthy people have done nothing directly to cause the poor to suffer. But if you examine it closely, you can find links from greed <---> suffering everywhere.