If your skills become common and accessible (YouTube) and the way to keep them profitable is through regulation, then something is wrong, wouldn’t you say?

We had many examples in history of gatekeeping a skill, most recently with taxi drivers.

Can you imagine similar restrictions imposed on software engineering jobs, say to require a computer science diploma? Not hard to imagine that in 10 years anyone with half a brain and ChatGPT and YouTube will be able to write general purpose, “does the job, good enough” software.

Plenty of counter examples like the German guild system ensuring quality of work, employment and education

Has it become catastrophic in the 200 years since the industrial revolution threatened this would be the case, while the world population went up eightfold?

Did the industrial revolution happen over an extremely compressed timeframe and feature machines that can assemble machines based on labor output data?

We could value work more independently of its contribution to enrich an employer/board/funder (lots of important work is done through volunteering) and build a sufficient social net that unemployment isn't a problem. With all the productivity gains we made over the last few decades, we could possibly even have no unemployment, if everyone was employed fewer days per week at a full time salary. But we don't want to share the added value we're producing with everyone, do we? We make the choice to prioritize shareholder revenue growth over avoiding catastrophic unemployment.