I have a controversial take that the only reason knowledge jobs have been well paid and fairly safe in the West was because for a while they've been difficult to outsource, not because the skills themselves are particularly rare or hard to acquire.

A few decades ago there was a focus in several low-cost economies (like China) to build out a manufacturing base and because of cheap global shipping it just made sense to outsource manufacturing. It's not that manufacturing is unskilled or "unproductive" as some claim.

Over the last few years hundreds of middles of people from countries like India have gotten online and in many of those countries today education and English is sufficient that with the internet knowledge jobs can be outsourced. And so obviously they will be.

This idea that there are jobs that require such high IQ and knowledge that only a Westerner can do them is kinda silly. We should assume a race to the bottom is the rule when it comes to labour. At the end of it the only jobs that will be safe are those which cannot be easily automated or easily outsourced. Those will probably be skilled manual labour jobs that require a physical presence – jobs like roofing or plumbing.