Who’s up for a bit of paranoia today? I agree with the trends the writer is describing, but too much drama. The link to the opinion piece:
So, let’s begin. Indeed, plenty of people in the office works on performance assessments, invoiceable hours, net margin, etc. Heck, these costs are properly classified as overhead costs.
How many roles essentially consist of processing information and then presenting it to someone to make a decision? Now not only the process and report will be automated, but perhaps the decision as well. This will result in the great disemboweling of white-collar jobs.
I’m not worried about this because it’s true, but because there’s indeed the hazard that the “stock market” will reward AI adoption measured in fired employees. The balance sheet will look great for a few quarters. Next, there might be a correction, but 1, 2 or more years without a job is a high price for corporate trial & error.
This automation wave will kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12 - 18 months. As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t. As one investor put it, “Sell anything that consists of people sitting at a desk looking at a computer.”
I like the name, seems appropriate.
I’ve started to call this displacement wave the Fuckening because that feels more visceral.
I don’t think the 20-50% decrease in employment the writer mentions will materialize. But, unemployment going up 2% is enough disruption.
Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves. Right now, there are about 70 million white-collar workers in the United States. Expect that number to be reduced substantially, by 20 – 50% in the next several years. Even a reduction of several million would be tectonic, and I fully expect it to go well beyond that level.
The opinion piece is centered in the US. There’s something which can be a couple of sneezes in the US but become a pneumonia in Switzerland. People trust the system here. And I spent some years in the university and the Swiss were a minority. Why? Because graduate education is a serious hit to your career income. Why spend years at the university earning less than an immigrant plastering gypsum in wall when you can earn the average or above with your business related EFZ/CFC? I guess this is the highest hazard from AI for Switzerland: people who think that they deserve better because they have always done what they’ve been told to do in life. And it only needs to be a minor increase in unemployment.
The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens…People are not going to take it well. Particularly educated people who think that they deserve better. That’s an ingredient for revolt.
Hopefully, the discontent will just be an increase in bitter middle-aged readers who believe they’re not valued enough at insideparadeplatz.ch or reddit/Switzerland. Honestly, I guess it will be higher distrust at whatever looks like foreign/immigrant. So, the Fuckening is a good name for this.
