[singlow]

I don't disagree, but concerning particular trades this is not true. In the mid-19th century there were more than seven thousand blacksmith shops in the US, which employed over fifteen thousand people, but today there are fewer than one thousand professional blacksmiths. Many of the products they produced either have lower demand or are produced by other means. If you consider the entire metalworking industry, we have many more total workers, but very few have the skills of a blacksmith.

The number of people who do the current work of an illustrator might go down eventually due to AI, but there will likely be more total people employed in the process of producing illustrations. It is just likely that fewer of them will have the skills that today's illustrators need, and also likely that fewer of them will command extraordinary wages. Many of the jobs that replace it will likely be closer to the median wage than today.

Also we will eventually turn the corner and start having population decline. For the US this might be just a few decades away. And some time after that, work would eventually decrease.