The debate about robots and employment tends to resolve into two camps: displacement catastrophism and productivity optimism. Both camps miss the more tractable and more dangerous question, which is not whether jobs disappear but where the disruption lands and how fast it arrives.

The GAO’s 2026 horizon report is notably careful here. It does not predict net job loss. It identifies three possible outcomes — new roles created, human workers augmented toward higher-skill tasks, direct substitution — and acknowledges that the balance between them depends heavily on the pace of workforce transition. Speed matters as much as magnitude. A twenty-year labor market shift that allows retraining and sectoral adjustment is a different policy problem from a five-year shock.