Gates hinted at it, but let me expand on why this time it really is different.

If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.

That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.

And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)

Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.

An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.

Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.