Will AI trigger the first white-collar recession—or just change what those jobs look like? This episode follows the quiet early tells—executive hiring freezes, six-figure postings sliding, silent software seat cuts, and a surge of offboarding tickets—to explain how task-level automation can thin openings, flatten wages, and hollow out the rungs juniors used to climb. We separate headline panic from real indicators and show how experience, not just efficiency, keeps organizations resilient when the economy cools.

Then we get practical for security teams. Even if your job survives, your attack surface won’t: agents, connectors, machine identities, and poisoned inputs expand risk while separation of duties quietly erodes. We lay out the guardrails—least privilege for agents, dual control on irreversible changes, auditable prompts and outputs, drift monitoring—and the career moats that make you hard to replace: incident command under uncertainty, adversary thinking, clear risk communication, and a toolsmith mindset that makes AI safer for everyone else.