Nearly three-quarters of people with “white collar” jobs have four year college degrees or higher. Keep that in mind as you read this article by Chip Cutter and Haley Zimmerman at the Wall Street Journal:
CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.
“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”
At JPMorgan Chase Marianne Lake, CEO of the bank’s massive consumer and community business, told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools.
The comments echo recent job warnings from executives at Amazon Anthropic and other companies.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a note to employees in June that he expected the company’s overall corporate workforce to be smaller in the coming years because of the “once-in-a-lifetime” AI technology.
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years, resulting in U.S. unemployment of 10% to 20%, according to an interview with Axios. He urged company executives and government officials to stop “sugarcoating” the situation.
Slight more than thirty years ago policy makers of both parties whole-heartedly embraced the notion that higher education was the key to a bright future. That has guided policy ever since. I have always thought it was short-sighted for relatively simple mathematical, psychological, and pragmatic reasons.
Those who benefit from a college education have IQs between one and two standard deviations above normal (less than 15% of the population). Individuals with IQs much below that struggle in college. Many will drop out having incurred considerable debt. Individuals with IQs much above that don’t actually need college. They’ll learn well enough without it.
In the olden days when I was in school about 10% of those of age went on to graduate from college. They were mostly pre-professional or pre-managerial. Nowadays nearly 40% of young people graduate from college and nearly 60% of young people have at least some college, degree or not. Many of them are doing jobs that would previously have been done without college educations.
No “white collar” jobs for them will not make them happy or erase their educational debts.
I suspect that “half” is understating the problem. I suspect that every “white collar” job that is not legally protected or that lacks the power to protect itself is at risk whether it makes sense or not. I doubt that many Fortune 500 CEOs will lose their jobs due to AI (even if AI could do those jobs better and cheaper).
That in turn will create a new problem. Why go to college? I daresay that most of those going to college do it as job preparation. What if college doesn’t prepare you for any jobs? Indeed, I suspect that problem is already here. Almost 90% of college students are already using AI. How much sense does it actually make to pay upwards of $50,000 per year to have AI do your work for you?
Oxford and the University of Bologna were founded in the 11th century. Cambridge and the Sorbonne were founded in the 13th century. In my view artificial intelligence presents an existential challenge to higher education greater than any they’ve faced in the more than a millennium during which higher education has existed.