Technology

AI is already replacing significant parts of the technical workforce. The key is that it doesn't have to successfully replace them. It just has to convince the sociopaths in the C-suites that they can pretend it will so they can layoff masses of employees. That will allow them to collect obscenely large bonuses, sell their stock at a huge profit, and move on to destroying the next round of businesses. Fortunately, the only people this will hurt are, well, us.

Except AI would break everything so just watch the digital fires that are about to get started. They already figured a method to put malicious code in AI crawlers. Imagine you tell AI to code and it uses malware in the code.

Well, not quite.

There are plenty of jobs that require smart people which can be automated a lot.

Business analytics, legal stuff, etc.

They won't kill the need for expert human minds yet, but the jobs will need significantly less people overall for the same work, which means less jobs in those areas, which then leads to less people being able to learn those jobs and we are headed towards elite humans VS most humans being struggling slave-consumers.

At least from a current perspective.

If universal income or such were a thing all those consumers could focus on creating and learning what they truly like, many turning into experts organically, most likely.

But no, society is too dumb and rigid to adapt to this reality without everything burning to the ground first

You could also go the other way, if you are smart incapable of being efficient at me menial labour. You will go hungry, until such a time you are hungry enough to do the menial labour for very cheap.

Turning us into two distinctly separate classes, low educated low intelligence, and high intelligence, highly educated elites controlling swarms of smart AI