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 way I see it you only have two real choices:

1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity

2. Democratize ownership

That's it.

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.