You’ve probably heard the speculation about this idea at some point over the last year or two. As AI gets more competent at specific tasks, some observers are becoming worried that the fears of AI job losses may indeed come true. In fact there may be some signs that it’s already happening.
Software company Salesforce started laying off thousands of people last year due to its increased use of artificial intelligence. The company quietly started laying off hundreds more earlier this month…
“It’s been eight of the most exciting months of my career,” Benioff said on a podcast, according to Business Insider. “I was able to rebalance my head count on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”
In case you don’t speak Silicon Valley executive jargon, Benioff was celebrating the fact that he was able to fire nearly half of his customer support division, thanks to artificial intelligence agents.
It’s a small example but it’s not the only place where employees are being encouraged to lean into AI. The question is where does that end?
Many companies—Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers among them—have instructed their employees to increase productivity by doing just that. But anyone subcontracting tasks to AI is clever enough to imagine what might come next—a day when augmentation crosses into automation, and cognitive obsolescence compels them to seek work at a food truck, pet spa, or massage table. At least until the humanoid robots arrive…
In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, estimated that it would eliminate “literally half of all white-collar workers” in a decade. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, revealed that “my little group chat with my tech-CEO friends” has a bet about the inevitable date when a billion-dollar company is staffed by just one person… Other companies, including Meta, Amazon, UnitedHealth, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS, which have recently announced layoffs, have framed them more euphemistically in sunny reports to investors about the rise of “automation” and “head count trending down.” Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it.
The best guess at this point is that the job losses and employment shifts probably will happen over time, just as they often do when new technology takes the place of old technology. Whether or not that shift creates a crisis in the job market, either in the US or worldwide, depends on how fast the change happens.
To understand how fast the present is hurtling us into the future, you need a fixed point, and the fixed points are all in the past. It’s like driving while looking only at the rearview mirror—plenty dangerous if the road stays straight, catastrophic if it doesn’t.
David Autor and Daron Acemoglu are among the most accomplished rearview drivers. Both are at MIT, and both excel at understanding previous economic disruptions. Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, studies inequality; Autor focuses on labor. But both insist that the story of AI and its consequences will depend mostly on speed—not because they assume lost jobs will automatically be replaced, but because a slower rate of change leaves societies time to adapt, even if some of those jobs never come back.
Labor markets have a natural rate of adjustment. If, over the course of 30 years, 3 percent of employees in a profession retire or have their jobs eliminated annually, you’d barely notice. Yet a decade later, a third of the jobs in those professions would be gone. Elevator operators and tollbooth attendants went through this slow fade to obsolescence with no damage to the economy. “When it happens more rapidly,” Autor told me, “things become problematic.”
I’ve been a bit of a skeptic of how smart AI actually is at this point in time. It seems to me it’s still better at expressing confidence in its abilities than it is in actually being helpful in a lot of areas. And yet, there are things that it seems to be really good at, including math and solving puzzles.
A smooth, white stone dating from the Roman era and unearthed in the Netherlands has long baffled researchers. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, scientists believe they have cracked the mystery: the stone is an ancient board game and they have even guessed the rules…
Other researchers at Maastricht University then used an artificial intelligence program that can deduce the rules of ancient games.
They trained this AI, baptized Ludii, with the rules of about 100 ancient games from the same area as the Roman stone.
The computer “produced dozens of possible rule sets. It then played the game against itself and identified a few variants that are enjoyable for humans to play,” Dennis Soemers, from Maastricht University, said in a statement.
I’m sure humans could have figured that out given enough time, but I bet the AI did it pretty fast. And while ancient games aren’t particularly useful, there are some things AI is doing that could be extremely useful and even life-changing, like learning how to fold proteins.
So, I’m seeing this as a mixed bag. There’s a non-zero chance that millions of jobs will be permanently lost over the next decade or maybe even faster. And that could be bad for a lot of individuals even if the economy is more productive than ever. On the other hand, we could also see medical breakthroughs accelerate to a rate never seen before over that same decade (see the video below).
How do you weigh those two things off against one another? What happens to all the people who no longer have jobs? It’s probably time to start thinking about it now.
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