I see lots of warranted skepticism about the capabilities of this tool, but the reality is that this is an incremental step toward full automation of white collar labor. No, it will not make all analysts jobless overnight. But it may reduce hiring of said people by 5 or 10 percent. And as people get better at using the tool and the tool itself gets better, those numbers will grow. Remember that it took decades for the giant pool of typing secretaries in Mad Men to disappear, but they did disappear. Gone forever. Interestingly, anger about the diminishment of secretarial male white collar work in Germany due to the spread of the typewriter a few decades earlier was one of the drivers of the Nazi Party’s popularity (see Evans, the Rise of the Third Reich).

AI’s triumph in the white collar workplace will be gradual, not instantaneous. And it will be grimly quiet, because no one likes white collar workers the way they like blue collar workers, for some odd reason, and there’s no tradition of solidarity among white collar workers. Everyone will just look up one day and find that the local Big Corp headquarters is…empty.