An article I read years ago about the "gig economy" lives rent free in my head. Its core thesis amounted to - in many companies particularly through the 20th century, it was at least possible for someone to come in at even a low entry level job and through hard work and effort and excellence, get promotion after promotion and make their way to senior management. You could get from factory worker to become foreman to become manager to become senior manager etc.

When you're an "independent contractor" with a megacorp as a monopsony over you, and your boss is an app, there's literally zero path from labor to management no matter how good you are.

And now with AI, that trend has entered a new stage. There's going to be that much fewer pathways from entry level AI wrangler to supervisor.