HEAVY COPE
Academic research presentation that documents genuinely negative short-term productivity effects and employment loss from AI adoption in manufacturing, but wraps these findings in a classic J-curve narrative where short-term pain leads to long-term gain for 'survivors' — framing worker displacement as temporary organizational friction rather than structural exclusion. The researcher explicitly acknowledges survival concerns but the dominant message is reassurance: firms that absorb costs and adapt will be fine, younger firms do better, and technology works if you have the right organizational preconditions. The low 23% adoption rate is used throughout as evidence that 'it's still early days' — a sophisticated early-stats minimisation that sidesteps whether aggregate demand for labor recovers at all, especially given the researcher notes large firms and those with specific production processes dominate the winners. The framing implicitly treats workers as requiring adaptation rather than examining whether aggregate demand for human labor survives.