The Worst-case Future for White-collar Workers [View all]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/ai-white-collar-jobs/686031/

No paywall link
https://archive.ph/SFhes

White-collar workers are getting nervous, with good reason. Sure, 98 percent of college graduates who want a job still have one, and wages are ticking up. Sure, some companies that cite the labor-saving, efficiency-promoting effects of ChatGPT and Claude as they let employees go are just “AI washing”—talking about algorithms to distract from poor managerial decisions.

But the labor market for office workers is beginning to shift. Americans with a bachelor’s degree account for a quarter of the unemployed, a record. High-school graduates are finding jobs quicker than college graduates, an unprecedented trend. Occupations susceptible to AI automation have seen sharp spikes in joblessness. Businesses really are shrinking payroll and cutting costs as they deploy AI. In recent weeks, Baker McKenzie, a white-shoe law firm, axed 700 employees, Salesforce sacked hundreds of workers, and the auditing firm KPMG negotiated lower fees with its own auditor. Two CNBC reporters with no engineering experience “vibe-coded” a clone of Monday.com’s workflow-management platform in less than an hour. When they released their story, Monday.com’s stock tanked.

Maybe algorithm-driven changes will happen slowly, giving workers plenty of time to adjust. Maybe white-collar types have 12 to 18 months left. Maybe the AI-related job carnage will be contained to a sliver of the economy. Maybe we should be more worried about a stock-market bubble than an AI-driven labor revolution.

I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, or even what is happening now. AI technology is changing at an exponential pace, and changing the workforce in a thousand hard-to-parse ways. But if AI quickly eliminates white-collar work, the country is going to end up in something much stranger than a downturn, and something much harder to recover from too.

*snip*