2026-03-05

Your Job May Already Be in Jeopardy | Michael Steinberger

• •workfutures.io Your Job May Already Be in Jeopardy | Michael Steinberger #AI #mar26 #might

Michael Steinberger opens his wide-ranging OpEd on the looming AI apocalypse with an anecdote about a young college grad who can't find work despite his degree in accounting, and instead joins the family tree service company. The classic humanizing a macro trend, a la Gladwell. Then the macroeconomic smokescreen we're hearing: maybe companies overhired in and after the pandemic? But when the Citrini Research 'thought experiment' hit the streets Wall Street freaked:

Then, after wondering why the people building all this AI are warning us of its potential for job destruction, the possible political fallout:

Historians have written a great deal about the past circumstances where suddenly disadvantaged elites turn to revolution.

An economy that created only 181,000 jobs in 2025?

Another economist, Gad Levanon, points out that 'hiring has come to a virtual standstill in finance, insurance, accounting, consulting and tech, which are pillars of the “knowledge” economy'. He posits that these companies must have found some solution to improve productivity without additional heads, which is LLMs. Supportin that are the claims of CEOs like Jack Dorsey of Block, who Steinberger quotes, '“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."' But former employees, Steinberger cites without a name or link, counter 'contend that poor management left Block with a bloated payroll and that A.I. is just a convenient excuse for the pink slips.' And another factor is that Wall Street loves this attrition: 'Whatever the truth, investors responded with delight to the news: Block’s stock soared over 20 percent, which is perhaps indicative of where Wall Street comes down on the job augmentation vs. job elimination question.'

Some white-collar workers might give up, if laid off and searching for jobs for a long time. And while people may be able to learn a trade and join the electricians building data centers for AI, I hear an echo of Judge Smails from Caddy Shack, stating 'the world needs ditch diggers, too'. But Steinberger points out that if millions have their white-collar jobs disappear, not all of them are likely to find work for anything like comparable pay: 'Even now, college-educated workers command an enormous wage premium — more than 70 percent, by most calculations — over those with only high school diplomas'. Of course, these dispossessed workers will be degreed, but those degrees will simply be less valuable, no matter how much they still owe for college loans.

He returns to the theme of how Americans feel about the seemingly inexorable march of AI, which is incipient rage at being dispossessed from the neoliberal compact, the Fordist pact: the mass machinery -- institutions, corporations, politicians -- will do what they do, so long as ordinary people can live their lives, save for retirement, and set their kids up for success. He quotes Martin Wolf, the chief economics correspondent of the Financial Times (not a bastion of leftist revolutionary thought):

'if lots of “skilled, trained thinking activities” are displaced by machines, it could provoke a furious backlash. “We could have a social and political crisis that makes deindustrialization look trivial,” [Wolf] said. “Deindustrialization, though one of the biggest forces shaping our world, shook the working class, particularly the male working class, from top to bottom. Shaking the prospects of the educated middle class is socially far more dangerous and explosive because it affects them and their parents, who are the people who run our societies in almost every possible way.”'

Steinberger mentions a few on Capitol Hill are worrying about the possible rending of the economy by AI, but fairly ineffectively.

What Steinberger doesn't say

I am reminded of an interview with Alan Supiot, the French political historian and theorist, where he quotes FDR:

"'The freedom of a democracy is not assured if the people tolerate private power growing to such an extent that it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself*. From recent history, [FDR] drew the lesson that "economic despotism" gave rise to fascism and that “government by organized money is as dangerous as government by organized crime.”

The rise of AI and the complacency of our elected officials in the coming dispossession of white-collar workers are outgrowths of private power and moneyed interests coöpting democracy. The elite, those who run institutions theoretically empowered to benefit us all, have abdicated that charge, as Christopher Lasch expounded in The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,. Rod Dreher decoded Lasch's arguments in 2021, and they still hold:

Lasch wrote the essays in Revolt near the beginning of the modern era of globalization, which can be dated to the end of the Cold War in 1989, the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991, and China’s growing presence as a global economic behemoth. The Clinton Administration, coming to power in 1992, made the Democratic Party’s peace with Reagan-era trade and economic liberalization. At the time, growing economic inequality troubled Lasch, who wrote, “People in the upper 20 percent of the income structure now control half the country’s wealth.”

Those were the days! According to a 2017 analysis by the Washington Post, the top 20 percent of Americans now control 90 percent of the country’s wealth. Both the decline of the working class thanks to post-1980s deindustrialization and the hollowing out of the middle class have been well documented.

So has the widening economic and moral chasm between what Charles Murray called the “New Upper Class” and the “New Lower Class.” The divide is not merely economic, but cultural. Lasch saw elites segregating themselves and their progeny into networks and institutions separate from the broader public. Unlike elites in past eras of US history, today’s elites feel less obligation to provide for the commonweal. Rather, they have seceded—socially, intellectually, and often into coastal liberal enclaves—from a country they do not understand and do not wish to understand, regarding it as a land of backward people “at once absurd and vaguely menacing.” Says Lasch, of these elites, “It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all.” This has become so pronounced in the past quarter-century that it’s hard to feel the same sense of urgency Lasch brought to his discussion.

In the final analysis, that is what Steinberger is missing: we have become inured to the disassociation of the elite from the world -- and lives -- of ordinary people. The uncomfortable fact that a massive adoption of labor-saving AI tools might -- must? -- lead to millions of workers to not only lose jobs, but to lose their hopes of middle-class life, and, this is being orchestrated so that the elite can collect all -- or at least most -- of the money to be made. Steinberger simply fails to name names: those who stand to benefit from the catastrophe they are engineering.

As Rebecca Solnit tells us, in Call Them By Their True Names, 'Naming is the first step in the process of liberation'. Those who seek to divorce themselves from our shared fate will fail, but only if we stop them before the point of no return.

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Thomas Greifenberger graduated from the University of Delaware last spring. Although he double-majored in finance and marketing and minored in economics, it took him just three years to earn his bachelor’s degree. He had hoped that his solid grades and demonstrated drive would help him land a position in the financial services industry. But when Mr. Greifenberger began his job search, it quickly became apparent to him that he was sending résumés into a void. He got a few nibbles — several companies invited him to do asynchronous video interviews.

Nothing more came of those opportunities, however, and after a point, he concluded that he was on a futile quest. “It was super discouraging,” he said.

He has returned home to Long Island, where he is now employed by his family’s tree service business. Mr. Greifenberger enjoys the work — he is often the guy up in the bucket, pruning branches — and the tangible results it yields. But he admits that it’s not the future he had envisioned for himself. “I still go on LinkedIn from time to time, but I think that ship has sailed for me,” he said.

Just a few years ago, an entry-level role with a bank or an asset management firm might have been Mr. Greifenberger’s for the asking. But the white-collar job market has cooled dramatically. While the unemployment rate remains relatively low, 4.3 percent, office jobs are suddenly a lot harder to come by, for recent college graduates and experienced professionals alike.

Many companies went on hiring sprees coming out of the pandemic, and the slowdown is perhaps just the inevitable adjustment. But it is happening against the backdrop of the generative A.I. revolution and fears that vast numbers of knowledge workers will soon be evicted from their cubicles and replaced by machines — fears being amplified by an army of online Cassandras. In a sequence of events that called to mind the 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” famous for convincing panicked listeners that aliens had really invaded, a recent Substack post imagining the economic hellscape that could result from an A.I.-induced white-collar blood bath helped send the Dow Jones industrial average tumbling 800 points. Anxious times.

It is certainly possible that we are in another moment of mass hysteria, even mass hallucination, and that A.I. will not cause permanent widespread joblessness — either because its capabilities will prove to be more limited than observers first thought or because our highly adaptable species will respond to technological change as it always has, by finding new sources of gainful employment. That the people selling the artificial intelligence are among those sounding the most ominous warnings about its potential fallout is notable, however. Some of them are prone to bombastic claims, but it is hard to see how spooking the public serves their interests. It might be wise to take their predictions at face value and assume that A.I. is indeed going to devour a lot of white-collar jobs.

While new ones will hopefully emerge, the transition won’t be painless, and if the cracks we are seeing in the labor market become sinkholes, the effect not just on our economy but also our politics could be profound. If millions of college-educated voters have their lives upended by A.I., they will surely make their fury known. That prospect should be causing alarm in Washington and spurring efforts to try to cushion Americans from the blow that may soon befall them — by giving serious consideration, for instance, to something like universal basic income. But it is an election year, Congress is barely functioning, and on this issue, as with so many others, inertia will very likely prevail.

So are those cracks the first signs of an A.I. jobs apocalypse? It’s too soon to say, but the employment picture has darkened. The economy added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, a shockingly low figure in a year that saw gross domestic product grow by a modest but respectable 2.2 percent.

According to Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University, what we are experiencing now — a sustained period of “slow job growth and gradually rising unemployment without a real recession” — is virtually unprecedented.

Another anomaly: White-collar workers have been disproportionately affected. Blue-collar and service workers are usually hit hardest when the job market turns, while white-collar occupations enjoy a degree of insulation because they are concentrated in “safer, less cyclically sensitive sectors,” says Mr. Katz. Now, however, knowledge workers are the ones struggling.

To be sure, this is not the first time the future of white-collar employment has been called into doubt. In the 2000s, some economists predicted that globalization would eviscerate office work much as it had manufacturing. But while a lot of jobs were sent overseas, others were simply transferred to less expensive parts of the country, and the anticipated white-collar collapse never materialized. It is very possible that the current slowdown is nothing more than a necessary correction after a period of overhiring.

But in a recent Substack post, the economist Gad Levanon of the Burning Glass Institute offered an alternative hypothesis. He noted that hiring has come to a virtual standstill in finance, insurance, accounting, consulting and tech, which are pillars of the “knowledge” economy. Mr. Levanon pointed out that companies in these areas have generally performed well of late while either trimming their head counts or keeping them largely unchanged, which suggested to him that they have found new ways to increase productivity without adding workers. It is unclear if A.I. is contributing to this trend, but the industries he cited all involve functions that seem especially ripe for automation.

This, of course, is the specter haunting millions of Americans who hold white-collar positions. In the not-so-distant past — which is to say, before the debut of ChatGPT in November 2022 — people with desk jobs feared being fired; now, they must also fret about whether the positions they have will even exist a year from now and if the skills they have developed over the course of a career are about to be rendered obsolete. Last year, Microsoft published a study identifying 40 jobs that it said could be most vulnerable to A.I. The list ranged from historians to P.R.specialists to data scientists to — gulp — writers. More recently, the Microsoft A.I. chief executive, Mustafa Suleyman, stated that most professional tasks will be fully automated over the next 12 to 18 months.

It looks all but certain that A.I. will transform knowledge work; the question is to what extent. The optimal outcome, says Harvard’s Mr. Katz, is that A.I. becomes a kind of “co-pilot” that helps people improve their skills and efficiency, and that new types of jobs replace those that are lost. Word that IBM plans to triple the number of entry-level employees it hires this year prompted lots of relieved chatter among office grunts sweating out the A.I. rollout.

The doomsday scenario is that businesses embrace A.I. agents as a substitute for querulous humans. The financial technology company Block announced last month that it was laying off 40 percent of its staff, around 4,000 people, because of the progress it claims to be seeing with A.I. In a social media post, Jack Dorsey, its chief executive, said 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.”

A few former employees have challenged his explanation: They contend that poor management left Block with a bloated payroll and that A.I. is just a convenient excuse for the pink slips. Whatever the truth, investors responded with delight to the news: Block’s stock soared over 20 percent, which is perhaps indicative of where Wall Street comes down on the job augmentation vs. job elimination question.

Some of those being let go may find comparable work. Others, however, could be unemployed for a while — it is a tough market — and as they run short of options and savings, they might have to follow Mr. Greifenberger’s example and consider nonoffice roles. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sure, when you hear tech oligarchs who haven’t screwed in a lightbulb or fixed a toilet in years extolling the virtues of being an electrician or a plumber, it is hard to suppress a laugh — and hard, too, not to see it as a cynical ploy to persuade Americans to dial back their expectations as A.I. comes for their jobs and more of the nation’s wealth is funneled upward.

But it seems a growing number of white-collar workers are looking at the skilled trades as a potential fallback, and if the rise of A.I. leads to a modest brain drain from the professions into fields such as construction and carpentry, it might also cause us to re-evaluate the prestige that we assign to certain types of labor but not others. It will definitely accelerate the development of so-called “new-collar” jobs, which blur the distinction between white and blue.

I got a glimpse of this trend during a recent visit to a company called Hadrian, a manufacturing start-up that leans heavily on automation and A.I. to produce parts for planes, rockets and satellites. One employee on its factory floor had worked for a commercial real estate brokerage. He traded a white-collar job for a nominally blue-collar one, but in a high-tech setting, and like all of the company’s employees, he is partly compensated with equity — a stake that could be lucrative if and when Hadrian goes public.

Still, that is just one person who made the switch, and there are only so many Hadrians. If A.I. proves to be a job killer and several million people are culled from the white-collar work force, it stands to reason that a significant percentage of them will have trouble maintaining their economic footing. For decades, white-collar jobs have been the main driver of social mobility in the United States. Even now, college-educated workers command an enormous wage premium — more than 70 percent, by most calculations — over those with only high school diplomas.

Many Americans already take a dim view of A.I. and feel as if they are being frog-marched to a future that they neither asked for nor wanted. If A.I. robs some of them of their livelihoods, knocks them out of the middle class and thwarts the aspirations of their kids, wariness will quickly give way to rage.^[1]

==In a recent interview, Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of The Financial Times, suggested that if lots of “skilled, trained thinking activities” are displaced by machines, it could provoke a furious backlash. “We could have a social and political crisis that makes deindustrialization look trivial,” he said. “Deindustrialization, though one of the biggest forces shaping our world, shook the working class, particularly the male working class, from top to bottom. Shaking the prospects of the educated middle class is socially far more dangerous and explosive because it affects them and their parents, who are the people who run our societies in almost every possible way.”

Mr. Wolf is not inclined to hyperbole, and when someone as reliably levelheaded as he is talking this way, it is a good indication that the risk is real. Given the upheaval we may soon be facing, it would be nice if we had a president capable of leading a thoughtful national conversation about where A.I. is taking us. Suffice it to say, Donald Trump is not that kind of president.

Some on Capitol Hill are treating the job threat seriously. Last fall, Senators Mark Warner and Josh Hawley introduced legislation that would require companies to provide information to the Department of Labor about the number of jobs they have cut or created because of A.I. and how they are helping employees navigate the new technology. But the bill would do nothing to ameliorate the circumstances of those who lose their jobs to A.I. On that front, we are apparently just going to hope for the best, not really plan for the worst and trust that creative destruction will somehow see us through it all.^[2]