More and more CEOs are speaking out on the fate of white-collar jobs with the advent of AI.
Ford CEO Jim Farley has said that AI will wipe out half of white-collar jobs in the US. He added that importance of the “essential economy” and blue-collar skilled trades, suggesting that they would become more lucrative in a post AI world.
“There’s more than one way to the American dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year [college] education,” Farley said at an event. “Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50% since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go? Artificial intelligence is gonna replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S,” he added.
Farley hinted that the advent of AI will result in an increase in demand for blue-collar and skilled jobs. “We all sense that America can do better than we are doing,” Farley said. “We need a new mindset, one that recognizes the success the importance of this essential economy and the importance to our vibrancy and sustainability as a country,” he added.
Farley is the latest tech CEO to warn about the impact of AI on white-collar jobs. Amazon had said that it expects its workforce to shrink over the next few years because of gains from AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI could wipe out 50 percent of white-collar entry level jobs by 2030. Atomberg’s Arindam Paul has said that AI will eliminate 40-50 percent of white-collar jobs in India.
Amid all this, blue-collar jobs seem a lot more secure. While there is progress being made in robotics, particularly in the humanoids space, robots aren’t yet deployed at scale in the real world. Going by how long it took to make self-driving cars a reality, it could take even longer to get robots to move around with humans. And if AI continues its relentless march over the next few years, it could lead to an inversion of value, in which blue-collar jobs could end up being a lot more lucrative than white-collar jobs across industries.