Blue collar workers may be enjoying a certain degree of schadenfreude at seeing the panic over tech, finance, and other white collar workers potentially losing their jobs to AI. But mass job destruction would end up being bad for virtually everyone who actually has to work for a living, not just overpaid office drones.
That’s according to one of the authors of a new report from Citrini Research that recently sent quivers of fear through the stock market for imagining a mass unemployment scenario caused by AI.
“Let’s say in our scenario, we talk about five percent of folks might get fired in a couple of years,” coauthor Alap Shah, CEO of Littlebird.ai, said on the podcast, as quoted by Business Insider. “Those five percent, if there aren’t white collar jobs for them to relocate into, then they’re going to have to move into the gig economy and the blue collar labor force.”
“And so that puts pressure on the entire labor market, not just the white collar one,” Shah added.
The Citrini report, published Sunday, imagines a hypothetical 2028 in which productivity advances enabled by powerful AI models outmode vast portions of the job market. That’s all fine with Wall Street, since the part that really had investors spooked was the paper’s prediction that this would also dry up consumer spending, cause a global stock sell-off, and collapse even dependable money-makers like the S&P 500. Shares in the Nasdaq Composite index fell by more than one percent on Monday, Bloomberg reported, as the gloomy paper went viral in investor and AI circles.
The paper’s certainly in tune with what plenty of figures in the AI industry have been warning about. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has consistently cautioned that the tech is poised to destroy entire categories of work. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proclaimed that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs. More recently, Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted that virtually all office tasks will be automated within 18 months.
As real as the threat of jobs destruction may be, however, the Citrini paper has been criticized by economists for being a little far-fetched.
“I would take it seriously, not literally,” Nick Ferres, CIO at Vantage Point Asset Management, told Reuters.
Krishan Guha at Evercore ISI said the paper relied on “extreme and improbable conditions” and argued that blue collar workers would actually stand to gain somewhat from the white collar layoffs.
“Although some of these workers would suffer from the drop in the demand from white collar workers, and/or from competition from newly displaced white collar, others with discrete skills would in effect be complements to AI, and their activities would be in greater demand as collapsing cost of AI-led tasks increased the desired volume of consumption of these…
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