And these men (because it always seems to be men) are specifically terrible at predicting what Americans are going to do because they fail to take into account how different Americans are from one another (and from themselves) and the motivations and priorities for different American cultural groups.

One problem that I'm always seeing when it comes to men predicting the future is the failure to account for the sheer amount of racial, gender, and social resentment and bias that exists in this country, and how that resentment impacts everyone's lives, and I can't help but point out that the men making these dire predictions are straight white men who simply do not take into account and long disregarded the lived experiences of people other than themselves.

For example, I am a Black woman who is a knitter, baker, painter, and crocheter. Today there is no machine that crochets, but there are knitting machines. The fact that there are machines that knit and weave doesn't mean that women like me stopped learning how to do these activities. In fact, more women learned how to do these activities during the pandemic.

There are machines that know how to make and bake bread, but that didn't stop people from learning how to make their own bread during the pandemic. Just because there are machines that can make something that looks like a painting tthat won't stop people from developing that skill.

I can't help but think the people most likely to panic about this issue are the mediocre individuals who aren't good enough at anything to be able to compete with machinery. They are not artists and possess none of these skills. They are not especially creative people or especially imaginative either (as seen in their predictions), and so they are definitely going to feel some type of way about their mediocrity being replaced by machines.