Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

Yet as they kept telling us, people don’t care only about their role as consumers; they care about their role as producers and, more broadly, about their relative place in society. For the working class, that place has been eroding, in relative terms, for decades. The kinds of jobs many of them now occupy — in retail, say, or on the lower rungs of the health-care system — have less social status than the old manufacturing jobs even when they pay as well. And they often require a combination of servility and soft skills that wasn't demanded on an assembly line.

Those people might be happier if AI improves their relative position — taking over an increasing share of high-status, high-paid knowledge work, while leaving humans the lower-skill tasks it still struggles with, such as chopping vegetables or helping an elderly person use the bathroom. In theory, perhaps, we should all be happier, as this would be what political leaders have long claimed they wanted: a return to the mid-century paradise when the college wage premium was modest, opportunity was broadly distributed, and incomes were compressed into a narrow band.

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But if so, we are also likely to see a revolt of the educated people who are losing ground, similar to the revolt that led the working class to embrace protectionism, and Donald Trump. Or at least that’s how it seems to me, when I try to imagine the upper middle class offering their own kids the advice they’ve so liberally dispensed to working-class men: “I’m sorry, but the jobs your parents had aren’t going to be around, and it’s time to face reality and look for steady work in food service or a warehouse.”

“I’d be fine with that!” some educated parent will inevitably write me, “as long as they have good health insurance and a strong social safety net.” I applaud those public-minded people, but, realistically, I doubt they’re the majority. For most upper-middle-class families, I expect there will be a lot of outrage and fear, and demands that the government do something to help them maintain their position and pass what they have onto their children.

Since the knowledge workers are a lot closer to the centers of power........

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