> more like witchcraft than engineering

Welcome to web development buddy

> how ML might change the labor market

Human labor is expensive. If LLMs do make things cheaper and faster to produce, you don't need that many humans anymore. Again, assuming the improvement is real, there absolutely will be shrinkage for existing businesses in headcount. What remains to be seen is how much cheaper machines make work. 1.5x? 2x? 10x? 100x?

> unlike sewing machines or combine harvesters, ML systems seem primed to displace labor across a broad swath of industries [...] The question is what happens when [..] all lose their jobs in the span of a decade

It's more like hand tools -> power tools; a concept applied to many things. Everyone will adopt them, and you'll need fewer workers who'll work faster with less skill. You get a gradual labor force shrinkage, but also an increase in efficiency, so it's not like a hole is opening up in your economy. A strong economy can create new jobs, from either private or public sources.

> ML allows companies to shift spending away from people and into service contracts with companies like Microsoft

The price of hardware, as it always has been, is a downward trend, while the efficiency of open weights is going up (it will plateau eventually but it's still going up). We already spend $20,000 on servers, whether it's buying them once on-prem, or renting them out in AWS. ML is just another piece of software running on another piece of hardware

> if companies are successful in replacing large numbers of people with ML systems, the effect will be to consolidate both money and power in the hands of capital

That ship left port like 30 years ago dude. Laborers have no power in the 21st century.