Wealth is stuff people want.
A "wealthy" person owns economic engines that deliver this stuff to people who want it. How wealthy they are depends on the number of engines, how much stuff they produce, and how much this stuff is wanted.
Why is this relevant?
Because to avoid replacement, we need to understand what exactly is in danger of being replaced.
And the answer, put simply, is our capacity to make wealth.
Most of the time, we work in exchange for money.
But it's really important to understand that money is not wealth.
It's just an intermediary. A way of transferring wealth from one specialised category to another.
When a lawyer gets a knee replacement, he doesn't pay the surgeon in tax returns. Instead, he turns his skill of writing tax returns into money, and then turns that money into a surgery.
This is a simple analogy, but it reveals another crucial idea:
An employee's "economic engine" lies in the rarity and usefulness of their skills. Some jobs (like a HR executive) are disconnected from the end user, and only indirectly make stuff people want, whereas others (like a carpenter) are more direct.
Many jobs fall somewhere in the middle.
We could argue all day about who will be replaced (and when). But when the downside risk is complete economic redundancy, I'd rather err on the side of caution.
And to do that, we first need a reality check.