A White-Collar Bloodbath Is Coming

[applegrove]

A White-Collar Bloodbath Is Coming

May 28, 2025 at 8:07 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 164 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2025/05/28/a-white-collar-bloodbath-is-coming/

The CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence, said that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Axios reports.

Applegrove:

I've been wondering why so much of MAGA policy results in death (anti vax for example, anti cancer research too, deaths of desperation) and now we know. Oligarchs need fewer people.

[Irish_Dem]

1. I think the same thing. The billionaires no longer need worker bees.

They don't need people to buy the cheap crap they sell.

They will have most of the world's money and resources.
And be in control of all governments.

And control all the information.

Trump is obviously culling the heard with the destruction of health care, science, research, etc.

Now we know why.

[Bad Thoughts]

2. Counterpoint: AI is junk

I'm sure that CEOs want to eliminate these jobs, perhaps firing or simply not hiring. However, AI is undercooked. Nowhere has it taken over for anything but the simplest jobs. It shows poor judgement and is underproductive. The economic damage will come, but the jobs will come back.

[applegrove]

3. I hope you are right.

[lostnfound]

7. Depends on the version, some is very good... Not bet-your-life good, but way better than many people

You can’t trust its accuracy, but the same can be said for 25% of human staff, depending on the task.
It can rapidly filter a report, use a separate reference document for context to categorize, point out anomalies, reformat an entire document from paragraphs to bullets in seconds,

[ancianita]

11. Yes. Good points. And Anthropic's Claude is probably the best of AI's out there.

It's AI wars right now, but Anthropic's got a shot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic

[IronLionZion]

9. AI doesn't unionize, take vacations, sleep, complain about the dirty foreigners stealing its jobs, etc.

So there are some CEOs who are fine with the shortcomings because they don't like dealing with human workers. Think about the tremendous shortcomings of hiring foreign workers on visas. That didn't stop them.

[valleyrogue]

14. I have heard this "automation" is going to destroy almost all jobs b.s. forever.

AI is so overrated. All of this is hype.

[RandomNumbers]

4. H-1B has already pretty much wiped out entry level jobs

in my field (in the US anyway). Easier to hire a contractor with a puffed up fake resume than actually develop talent. (Never mind that the contractor usually sux at the job ... but are actually just good enough, just often enough to keep this HR model going)

I am glad I can reasonably expect to be retired before AI comes stumbling and crashing in to un-employ 50% of the rest of us.

[Tarzanrock]

5. I'm old enough to remember what the world was like before

there were personal computers (PC's) and cell phones operating as computers which you carry around in your back jeans pockets. I'm pretty cognizant of the unbelievable changes to the world which the personal computer brought. A.I. and generative A.I. is going to change the world like nowhere near what anyone can even imagine today. The world is going to change more in the next 20 years than it has changed in the last 2,000 years.
For example:

In 2023, AlphaFold 2, trained on Nvidia’s A100s, solved protein folding – the most important and valuable medical innovation of all time. This will vastly accelerate drug discovery and will lead to a massive increase in human life spans.
Nvidia’s DRIVE platform powers Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (“FSD”), deployed in 1 million vehicles. Waymo’s self-driving taxis, using Nvidia’s A100s, have already logged 20 million autonomous miles and have reduced accidents by 30% where deployed.
Nvidia is powering massive increases to education, globally. Khan Academy’s AI tutor, trained on Nvidia’s A100s, reached 10 million students globally in 2024. There’s no question that the entire structure of education – and especially college – will be dramatically restructured over the next few years. Why pay $100,000 a year for a teacher who isn’t 1% as smart as the generative-AI platform Grok?
Nvidia will transform entertainment. Pixar’s Toy Story 4 (2019) used Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080s for real-time rendering, cutting production time by 40%. At some point within the next few years, someone will produce an entire Academy Award-winning feature film using only AI-generated actors and scripts.
Today Nvidia’s H100s train vastly more complex models like GPT-4 in weeks. Soon, it will be days. And then, in a decade or so, in real time. I can't even begin to imagine living in a world without having a Personal Computer and the Internet today. The advances in the next 5 - 10 years will be so astonishing that today, May, 2025, will likely seem as primitive to me as was 1975 - 1985 compared to today.

[OAITW r.2.0]

6. If people aren't working, they aren't buying stuff.AI could kill capitalism.

[lostnfound]

17. Yes, there's that a point also. The concentration may be 5% working and rich; 15% "essential", and 50% gig.work

Financial insecurity and people competing for gig work or ‘skills’ tasks

[2naSalit]

8. Won't be long before...

We strt hearing talk about how the rapture is just around the corner. We all have to die for them to have the rapture, for the evangelicals that is. For the oligarchs, it's simply reducing the drain on resources, once everything is automated, they think they won't need us.

[Red Mountain]

10. Weirdly like an anti-industrial revolution

Social unrest? We ain't seen nothing yet.

[LudwigPastorius]

13. Butlerian Jihad, anyone?

[Jack Valentino]

12. Artificial Intelligence doesn't have a union...

reason enough for the ruling class to be licking their chops over it

[Amishman]

15. Technology and automation are coming for blue and white collar jobs

Anything that you can break down into discrete rules is on the chopping block, especially if it is repetitious.

The safe places to be are areas where people are willing to pay a significant premium for human interaction (and there are fewer of those than you think), jobs that primarily deal in on-offs and unique circumstances (where the effort to define the rules / scenario each time is greater than the task itself), and where decisions are subjective and/or the factors are difficult to quantify.

UBI is going to be needed, as there will be more people than jobs.

The technology to do a lot of this exists today, the biggest obstacle is cost of implementation. People with the intelligence and mindset to design, configure, and maintain complex systems and automation are expensive today - increase the number of systems in use and the demand for those people goes even higher. The senior managers who decided to do the project don't understand how their company actually works and set it up for failure before it even starts.

These projects typically go like this:

System X can automate process Y, eliminating Z jobs.

Senior leadership gets all excited, signs a contract with an implementation partner and hires a few IT people to be the long term team.

Things go to shit right away. Implementation team immediately finds that the business process in place now is different from the workflow of System X, and poorly documented.

Project gets behind as the implementation team scrambles to interview dozens of mid level managers to find out what the actual process is, and document it. This is a nightmare as critical information is only in people's brains, and no one can remember why they do it that way.

System X can't be reconfigured to do the unique process the company actually follows. They have to choose between completely changing their internal process (which is painful and expensive) or only partially implementing the system. Almost every project I've been on chooses the latter when they hit this point.

The implementation team has kept the in-house IT folks as sidelined as possible - to hide their own struggles and also to limit knowledge transfer. The less the in-house IT team can do as maintenance, the more follow-up contracts they get.

End result is a system that can only do half of what it was supposed to, only eliminated half as many jobs as was promised, and is more expensive to maintain than budgeted.

[thought crime]

16. That's the plan.

Our esteemed oligarchs think white collar workers can get jobs in factories that will re-locate to the US after Liberation Day. Alternatively, they can work in the fields or meat packing plants. Or they can do landscaping. All those things “favored” by undocumented workers who will be sent “home”.

A better idea is to do Content Creation using AI tools. One idea: make lots of short little U-tube comedies ridiculing oligarchs.

Meanwhile, AI is going to create jobs, too. I saw a little delivery robot in Helsinki a couple of days ago, chugging along on one of the many nice wide sidewalks. It politely stopped for anyone walking by. There’s a little company running those things, enabled by fine public infrastructure.

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/25222-finnish-grocery-chain-expands-robotic-delivery-to-over-100-stores-by-year-end.html