>I’m not sure if this really is different or not. I also think there’s an enormous amount of white collar work that isn’t actually “intelligent” work. Especially in software development.

There's a lot more outside of software development.

It's mystifying to me why software - where bugs or weird behaviors are often obvious to users - is considered easier to replace with these tools than, say, product management (is this accurate research about what features would drive what revenue? who knows even today! is this summary of customer feedback accurate? nobody's gonna know if it's not!), marketing, middle management, or any number of line-of-business "inspect stuff and pass it along to the next person on the chain" roles.

So much of those roles are basically "how can we turn people into process-following machines for consistency and predictability" and intentionally de-valuing intentional reasoning. Adding natural language processing of the inputs/outputs + deterministic rule systems on what to do is basically the entirety of replacing them.

>“what do we do when we’ve successfully vanquished work itself?”

How does automating white-collar paper-pushing get us over the hump here? I think that would require a combination of human-level reasoning + extremely good robotics and automation, at the self-servicing level.

Which could be coming.

But until it happens, I think the real question around the "future of work" are more around what the future of exchange is. It doesn't necessarily have to look like 40 hour work weeks, which is a pattern that arose from pushback against industrialists trying to get ever-more hours out of people to watch the automation machinery and run the factories etc.

I think the interesting, non-apocalypse options fall into two categories:

1) what if you don't need white-collar knowledge factories anymore but smaller groups of individuals can establish markets between themselves with much-more-personalized services and solutions. Can you reverse the traditional economies of scale? Running SaaS as a megacorp requires a certain amount of hard-to-iterate-in-a-try-until-the-tests-pass decisions and expertise since you're trying to be everything to everyone 24x7. If you can provide a more customized version of the same service to a smaller group of people with much less operational overhead for even just 1/10000'th of a giant SaaS vendor's current revenue, you might have something (1/10000 of Salesforce's 40B revenue, for instance, is quite non-trivial).

2) what will people want when everything they spend heavily on today is commoditized? This is the historical path, and why we've never vanquished work in the past. Either ways to get an edge over a competitor by doing more for less, instead of the same for less; or improvements in essential goods and services (you don't need million dollar cancer treatments before they exist, but once they do you don't want to opt out); or in new novelties, keeping up with the Joneses. Showing off. Etc.