If dropping what your doing to learn a trade is shortsighted then what else should one learn that wouldn't be shortsighted?

An economic pivot due to automation replacing jobs wouldn't be the same as a normal economic downturn. It would be a massive increase in production since that's the only way jobs would be replaced and that would generate huge wealth that would likely enable significant demand. We passed basically a UBI (minus the universal part...) bill for COVID for non-essential workers who couldn't work, I would be shocked if we didn't pass a true UBI if automation was really starting to replace massive numbers of jobs. That UBI would generate far more demand especially for anything not automated (which would make it risky if most everything wasn't automated due to inflation).