Gemaliel I am a white collar Engineer, like you mention. I can tell you that you are way behind in what you surmise is the future. Automation has already removed most labor from most jobs. Amazon for example alteady automates far more than it still employs people to do, and yes the demand for white collar Engineer jobs is still higher than ever.
Now, as you say, the effort towards automation is focused on a lot of domains we once thought were "safe", like art and design, and even story writing and journalism.
The truth is automation has already swallowed up most of what the working public did.
I still remember being told, early in my Engineering training almost thirty years ago, the job of the best Engineers is to put all the other Engineers out of work.
I am proud to say I've done more than my fair share of that, and hope I am far from done.
I want everyone out of work including me. My final task as an Engineer, I hope, is to put me out of work.
The reason this doesn't make sense to you, I would suggest is because you are conditioned to believe the function and purpose for humans, is to do work, for some employer or another.
This is what the system wants you to believe. This is how it makes folk like your good self accept working for nothing more than the right to live. You are the ideal employee, and yet that makes you redundant.
What isn't apparent to you yet, is that profit is the thing underlying all business, still, this is what drives it, what business currently exists for, and which is ultimately unsustainable, the thing already wiping out much of humanity, and which will finish humanity and all of life on Earth, if it is not stopped, it is even swallowing up all business itself. Profit, is eating itself.
That is because profit is completely dependent on energy extracted from Earth, and energy extracted from Earth is being superseded, by energy added to Earth, leaving profit with nothing left to do. Profit is coming to have less and less usefulness.
That is why all companies, no matter how big or small, and even all people, are struggling to still make profit, the value is being lost from money itself, which is in the end just a carrier of energy.
We can think of this as the energy content of money, the number of Joules per token, reducing.
The trouble is that money, to date has mostly only carried mathematically negative energy, that is energy extracted from Earth.
What money needs to become, is something carrying mathematically positive energy, that is energy added to Earth.
Put simply, money needs to move from being an instrument of negative energy, to an instrument of positive energy.
And it is becoming so, because although money does not yet represent positive energy, it can be instantly switched to represent positive energy, by giving it away for free.
That is because we've been receiving positive energy for years, but never officially monetised it, by giving it away for free.
When 4Tn stimulus was issued in US, the value of money went up, whilst no return was being demanded for the stimulus.
After the stimulus was stopped, and people told by governments and banks that this money has somehow to be repaid, by collection of taxes, the value of money dropped again, and is still dropping, because this the official line still of all governments and all banks, who understandably can see that their own place in the system of profit is lost, if there becomes no further function of profit.
This is the real crisis of the elites, they are the ones currently facing the end of their function in the old world of negative energy that was energy extracted from Earth.
You are not alone in this misconception. Most scientists, most Engineers, Most politicians, most bankers, you name it, everyone still stuck in the old world of profit and mathematically negative energy, are having their minds turned upside down, by this information, that mathematically positive energy, ends the old world of all things driven by profit.
Because most people don't understand how the world can work, with no profit incentive to drive everything, they are afraid that the world will grind to a halt, when actually the opposite will happen, a new world of a new machine of humanity, one we have been unconsciously building for thousands of years, a machine capable of adding far more value to Earth and nature than we ever removed from it, is about to be switched on, when we finally come to accept that money given out for free is the thing needed to convey mathematically positive energy to all people.
Banks, governments, most of what we currently call a legal system, and of course taxation, all become redundant, when this machine is switched on.
Ray, and people like Greta Thunberg, instinctively knows this, whereas you don't.
They know it because of something we might call faith, or spirituality.
I know it because of this thing we call Engineering.
Your view is still the more popular, backed by all of conventional, science, all established business, all governments, who still maintain control of the profit driven system, the old establishment, all dependent on mathematically negative energy.
They mostly fail to understand this, because they fail to put any validity in religion.
This skepticism of religion, is the only reason I can see why science failed to trace out the implications on society, of not mathematically signing the energy that humanity lives on, positive from source, negative to sink.
Religion, most of it, has been trying to tell us this all along, but we never listened, too busy making profit.
Now we have no choice.
We do it, or we perish.
These are the religious end times, this is what we were warned about all along, the future of our species now depends on us making the required change, from the energy of our host planet, to the energy of the environment of our host planet.
That would be our species being born, just like a chicken is born from an egg, a plant is born from a leafless shoot, a baby is born from a womb and weaned off its mother's milk, you name it, everything born goes through a similar process.
Our purpose, as an adult species, is something to add value to our host planet, rather than being a burden to it, as we were, as an infant species.
The danger, that religions appear to have been designed to warn us all about, is that we never realise this, and so never get to fulfil our purpose as a species.
It looks like many other intelligent species have made this same mistake, and religion is their effort to try to make us aware of this danger, that we might fail to meet our destiny, just like they did, but realised too late.
To succeed, the elites have to learn to give the energy that every human needs to live, about 150 Joules per second per day.
Every human, receiving that energy in a way that it can be increased to 800 or so Joules per second in short bursts, unconditionally, unlimited, forever, has everything they need to add as much or as little value to Earth as they choose.
When the energy supplying that is mathematically positive, then every human adds value to Earth just by existing.
To believe this, we have to have faith, maybe even spiritual faith.
This looks like the thing missing, it seems to me, hence the reason I write about it, in Medium.