> this essay looks at how AI and automation are flattening the Phillips curve

Sounds like a causal relationship between a very narrowly focused observation (more AI + robots) and a very general phenomenon (Phillips curve flattening). This is a futile hypothesis to begin with.

> There is an entire industry in trying to understand the changing curve, and I will just lay out the main arguments made.

And then you just go and dismiss them, without providing evidence, just to claim (not prove or support) that your own theory is a better explanation, i.e., AI and Robots are to blame.

> Why is bargaining power changing? In a word, automation.

Automation has existed for 100+ years. So you are actually providing evidence against your own argument here, because, as you noted, the graph did not flatten until, allegedly, 2009 -- and even then I'm with Terr. BTW, what significant event happened in 2009? If AI will revolutionize labor then that's only starting now (maybe as of 2022). And the robotics market has not had any significant break-through event either. It has grown very steadily, but so has, say, the number of smartphones.

> Check the following graph from a 2019 Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco paper. The curve flattened a little in the 1980s and 1990s, and then basically flat-lined in the 2000s.

I am instinctively distrustful of this graph, with its three completely independent trend-lines formed by semi-arbitrary time periods. It reminds me of Simpson's Paradox [0] or some climate-denial stuff where carefully-placed splits allowed someone to express an overall upward trend as 5-6 locally flat trendlines. [1]

A quick search didn't yield anything useful for doing it myself, but I'd like to see the same plot except with atrend-path formed by a running average, without discontinuities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

[1] https://skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47