The Displacement

The labor cliff did not arrive as a cliff.

I want to be careful with the metaphors that survived this period in the histories. The cliff metaphor is one of them. It suggests a sudden vertical drop, a single moment of falling. It suggests, more than anything, that you would notice the moment you went over the edge.

What actually happened, between the spring of 2032 and the spring of 2034, was that the market price of a wide range of cognitive labor declined by between sixty and ninety-four percent.