Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
can be a blue collar worker enjoying a certain amount of schadenfreude Given the nervousness among tech, finance, and other white-collar workers about potentially losing their jobs to AI. But massive job destruction would be really bad for everyone who actually has to work for a living, not just overpaid office drones.
This is according to one of the authors of a new report from Citrini Research, which recently caused fear in the stock market by imagining a scenario of mass unemployment due to AI.
“In our scenario, we talk about five percent of people being laid off in a few years,” co-author Alap Shah, CEO of Littlebird.AI, said on the podcast. as quoted business insider. “Those five percent, if there aren’t white collar jobs for them to move to, they’re going to have to go into the gig economy and the blue collar labor force.”
“And that puts pressure on the entire labor market, not just white-collar workers,” Shah said.
The Citini report published on Sunday imagines a hypothetical 2028 in which productivity advances enabled by powerful AI models overtake vast swaths of the job market. That’s all fine with Wall Street, because what really spooked investors was the newspaper’s prediction that it would also reduce consumer spending, send off global stocks and send even reliable money makers like the S&P 500 falling. Shares in the Nasdaq Composite Index fell more than one percent on Monday. bloomberg informedThe disappointing paper soon went viral in investor and AI circles.
This paper is certainly in line with what many AI industry figures have warned about. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has consistently warned that the technology is poised to destroy entire categories of work. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has declared that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. More recently, Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman predicted that almost all office tasks would be automated within 18 months.
However, as real as the threat of job losses may be, the Citini paper has been criticized by economists as being a bit far-fetched.
“I would take it seriously, not literally,” said Nick Phares, CIO of Vantage Point Asset Management. told reuters.
Krishna Guha at Evercore ISI said the paper relied on “extreme and impossible scenarios” and argued that blue collar workers would actually stand to gain some benefits from white collar layoffs.
“While some of these workers will suffer from declining demand for white-collar workers and/or competition from newly displaced white-collar workers, others with different skills will actually be complemented by AI, and their activities will be in greater demand as the falling costs of AI-led tasks increase the desired amount of consumption of these products,” Guha wrote in a note. as quoted financial Times. “Because their productivity will not increase as fast as AI-led productivity in cognitive tasks, these blue-collar workers will see larger relative wage gains. And they will certainly consume.”
To some extent, AI-related layoffs are likely already happening a report It found that AI was cited in more than 54,000 layoff announcements last year. Yet these could become examples of “AI washing” – job cuts motivated solely by financial reasons, and not because of the technology’s actual capabilities. In other words, AI may merely provide a convenient excuse.
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