The honest assessment
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what the record consistently shows: the adjustment is real, uneven, and long. Workers in routine roles and those with limited adaptability face significantly greater re-employment challenges than their more flexible peers – a finding confirmed by studies of automation’s impact on plant closures in Australia and Belgium, and analyses of mass layoffs in Germany and Sweden (Beer et al., 2019; Goos et al., 2021; Blien et al., 2021, as cited in Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford Academic, November 2025).
