Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Marco Bello/Getty Images
Andrew Yang – millionaire entrepreneur, renowned Ivy Leaguer, and one-time presidential candidate – has a dire warning for his fellow salaried professionals: AI is going to eliminate “millions” of office jobs in the coming months.
In an essay published on his substack And flagged by business insiderYang explained what he calls “the great abolition of white-collar jobs” due to AI.
“Do you sit at a desk all day and look at a computer?” He challenged. “Take this very seriously.”
“This automation wave will drive out millions of white-collar workers over the next 12-18 months,” Yang wrote. “As soon as a company starts streamlining, all their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t. As one investor said, ‘Sell anything that has people sitting at desks looking at computers.'”
Yang predicts mid-career office professionals will be among the first to leave. Right now, there are about 70 million office workers in the United States, but “expect that number to drop substantially by 20-50 percent over the next several years,” the entrepreneur warned.
Yang even went so far as to urge anyone in mid-career management, especially those who own homes in the affluent areas of Silicon Valley or Westchester County, New York, to put their homes up for sale now to avoid the storm that may come once the labor apocalypse arrives. “It may not feel great to be first, but you don’t want to be last,” Yang wrote.
Going forward, Yang predicted that personal bankruptcies “will increase” as office workers struggle to find gainful employment to maintain their lifestyles. This, he says, will also extend to service workers in addition to office work – those employed as dry cleaners, hair stylists and dog walkers.
According to Yang, the “big disappointment” will also affect recent college graduates – a class that is already suffering from a brutal hiring market in the US.
All of this will result in even more unrest and anger as the wealth generated by the boom in AI spending will largely go to a few CEOs and executives at the top of the food chain. “Imagine what people will think when we all feel like slaves to AI overlords who have sucked out white-collar work?” Yang says.
At the end of the day, Yang’s announcement sounds like a lot of disastrous things said by other AI, most of which, ironically, come from the tech giants themselves. Like those predictions, Yang’s ends when the time comes to find a creative answer to the world-looming crisis beyond some vague idea of universal basic income.
“Expect this to be incredibly, intergenerationally, difficult,” Yang concluded. “Get over the troubles, and do what you can for yourself and those around you.”
More on AI: It turns out that constantly telling workers that they will be replaced by AI has serious psychological effects.
