As IT and service professionals, we’ve watched industries collapse over the course of our careers. We’ve seen the displaced from automation and outsourcing, and since the 1980s the answer has always been the same: learn technology. Learn to program. Get a degree.

We’re living in the middle of a transition that in the 1970s was labeled Future Shock but on a global scale that makes that transition into the silicon age seem like a quaint anecdote. We got through it. It was rough. But there was a path… learn, adapt, and accept.

For 50 years this worked. But now what we have left is a pileup of skilled, educated people with nowhere else to pivot. And even if everyone switched to manual labor tomorrow, there aren’t nearly enough of those jobs to absorb the need… and those are in the path of automation as we speak. I know, I was working on that automation in my last role like everyone else in construction has been to shave just another penny off the bid.

While looking for work, I’m talking to people. Everyone from leadership to the guys at the end of the line and the disconnect I’m seeing is staggering. And it’s not just coming from the top.

It’s specifically the people who are still employed. Still swimming in the pot and haven’t noticed the rising temperature of the water yet.

I talk to companies neck-deep in AI deployment, run by teams where the leads will honestly tell you their background isn’t IT but proudly show you the impressive thing they’ve built (and, I’ll be honest, it’s impressive). But, what they’ve built is a decade of technical debt compressed into six months of adrenaline-fueled delivery. The incentive structure rewards shipping and moving on. Nobody’s career depends on being there when the bill comes due.

And at the top of all of this, a handful of people are extracting wealth at a pace that has no historical precedent, apparently without understanding that wealth is a claim on a functioning system. If the system underneath it breaks, the number on the balance sheet is just a number.

Because on the other end of the line are people who are 12/24/36 months out of work… or “under-employed”. Doing courier runs to scrape together enough to keep a roof overhead and make a car payment, because Uber Eats is the lifeline. What happens when nobody on the other end can afford delivery anymore? What happens when the gig economy runs out of people with disposable income to serve?

Something has to change, and it’s not optional. We’re not in a situation where people can pack up and migrate somewhere that still has room for ambition. For most of human history that pressure valve existed and right now, it doesn’t.

So the question isn’t whether this is a problem. The question is what we do next. And I don’t have a clean answer. But I know what happens if we keep pretending it’s not the question.