Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

The vast majority of jobs that sustain our standard of living are blue-collar: farmers who grow our food, textile workers who make our clothes, construction workers who build our homes, plumbers, electricians, waste disposal workers, etc. I'd say it's white-collar work that became overinflated this past century, largely as a reaction to the automation and outsourcing of many traditional blue-collar roles.

Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.

It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.

The whole AI thing is just a symptom, I think. The real causes are:

1. The boomer political class that is perfectly fine with spending more and more money but unwilling to pay for it, mortgaging everything the previous generations built. Basically sucking all the value out of it for themselves so that their children and grandchildren will have nothing.

2. A big symptom is that tax rates on the richest have been going down for the last 50 years, and are now ridiculously low.

3. The thing that makes that work: unnaturally low interest rates, for the last several decades.

4. A complete unwillingness to use antitrust to break up the largest companies.

I don't see how this is going to turn around, because the propaganda is now so good they have convinced the poor that all of this is somehow good for them.