Andrew Yang claims AI will cause 'jobpocalypse' among white collar workers within the next 18 months [View all]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-presidential-candidate-claims-ai-160740988.html

Former presidential candidate claims AI will cause ‘jobpocalypse’ among white collar workers within the next 18 months
Isabel Keane
Thu, February 26, 2026 at 10:07 AM CST

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has issued a desperate warning that artificial intelligence may cause a “jobpocalypse” that would leave white-collar workers without jobs within the next 18 months.

Yang, who competed in the 2020 Democratic primary, has become the latest public figure to question how the current AI boom may impact the employment of millions of Americans.

“I believe that millions of white-collar workers are going to lose their jobs in the next 12 to 18 months due to AI,” Yang said in a video shared to Instagram Saturday.

“AI is now able to do the work of a very, very smart human in minutes or even seconds. This is going to displace marketers, coders, designers, lawyers, accountants, call center workers — you name it,” he continued.

Yang warned that, as a result, there would be an extreme “winner-take-all” economy, in which only the wealthiest people, or the top 20 percent, would be able to thrive.


...


https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/technology/block-square-job-cuts-ai.html

Block Cuts 40% of Its Work Force Because of Its Embrace of A.I.
About 4,000 workers will lose their jobs as the payments company does more work with new artificial intelligence tools, its top executive said.
By Natallie Rocha
Feb. 26, 2026 Updated 8:08 p.m. ET

Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal, said on Thursday that it was cutting 40 percent of its work force as it embraced new artificial intelligence tools.

About 4,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs, Jack Dorsey, the company’s top executive, said in a social media post.

The cuts, made as Block reported strong financial results for its most recent quarter, are perhaps the most striking example so far of a technology company’s making plans to eliminate employees because of A.I.

“Something has changed,” [Dorsey] wrote. “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.”

Whether computer programmers — and white-collar workers in general — will be replaced by A.I. is an increasingly urgent question being asked in Silicon Valley and by politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.

...