The anxiety surrounding whether artificial intelligence will cannibalize human labor treats an ongoing, decades-long trajectory as though it were a sudden revelation. Displacement is neither novel nor unprecedented; it is merely advancing into higher strata.
When I departed the corporate apparatus roughly fifteen years ago, the initial stages of this attrition were already well underway. Financial trading floors—once teeming hubs of human frenzy and intuition—were systematically hollowed out by algorithmic execution. High finance, of course, never employed the general populace. Yet that consolidation served as an instructive laboratory for what now approaches the broader white-collar landscape.
The modern office remains populated by vast tiers of administrative labor, largely because mid-level corporate hierarchies are organized around the accumulation of headcount. Executive prestige has historically been quantified not by lean efficiency, but by the size of the bureaucratic apparatus under a manager’s direct purview. Fiefdoms demand retainers. This psychological vanity is the primary reason so many glass towers remain staffed by paper-pushers performing tasks that software rendered obsolete years ago.
So long as cheap liquidity and corporate inertia subsidized this inefficiency, the old operational architecture held firm. That grace period has expired.
The advanced economies are now entering an extended period of stagflation and structural contraction—a lean cycle that will span well over a decade. Under sustained macroeconomic pressure, bureaucratic vanity becomes an unsustainable luxury. Survival will dictate that balance sheets be stripped of redundant human friction.
Simultaneously, the geopolitical imperative to reshore strategic industries from abroad will generate capital deployment, but it will bear no resemblance to the historic domestic manufacturing base, nor to the labor-intensive foreign facilities it replaces. Reshoring in a high-cost environment requires aggressive, end-to-end automation. Capital will be poured into robotics, squeezing every margin to preserve operating viability.
Inevitably, this mechanical discipline will travel upward into the glass offices. The administrative bloat will be cut, and with it, the mid-tier managerial strata whose sole utility was overseeing them.
Yet those anticipating a dramatic, overnight rupture will misunderstand the process. History rarely reorganizes capital through instantaneous cataclysms. It arrives as an unyielding, silent attrition—a slow creep that dissolves institutions from within before anyone admits the floor has cleared.
https://www.cfact.org/2026/10/20/the-ai-policy-debate-suffers-from-a-dangerous-plague-of-vagueness/