AI's Impact on Blue Collar Jobs: Truths and Myths Explored
Dang, put this next to Anthropic CEO claims AI will claim half of blue collar jobs and drive unemployment up to 20% and one wonders what's true.
Dang, put this next to Anthropic CEO claims AI will claim half of blue collar jobs and drive unemployment up to 20% and one wonders what's true.
this one is particularly interesting to me bc i have several friends who work at anthropic who say that they have open conversations about this all of the time
Like, about whether it's true?
that there need to be more tools, trainings, etc, for people who will continue to be in the workforce to learn how to work with ai
RIGHT?
oh, 100%
Like of course the guy looking to make billions off AI is saying that AI is going to kill all our jobs
HIS AI, as a matter of fact!
You might as well as surrender now and buy Claude!
I maintain that AI taking all the jobs WOULD BE FINE if we could just then make art and take walks all day instead.
i am wondering what will break the boom
it will be years before policy can touch it
If we had only elected a different leader...
oh yeah, years before policy has a will to touch it
Given the current admin
But the fact that 90% of products don't work the way companies say they'll work and are basically just vaporware, I think that'll do it
eventually
I think the boom will bust when we all collectively realize that .. it's not really working. Maybe it's just me? But at a personal and professional level, I'm seeing people just keep trying to get AI to do things and then it (a) sucks or (b) has to be reworked to be good.
My partner got Claude to plan date nights for us which seemed cool! Until all the events didn't meet our parameters (were only held on Thursdays, ended at 3 pm, etc)
That's what kills me. Most of the time you're going output from AI and then spending time fixing it. You could've just done it yourself!
It's always like that for me.
And we're getting to the point where even people posting content on LinkedIn that complains about AI ... clearly used AI to write it. So I think everyone will collectively get sick of it.
we’re rational people, so that makes sense to US
it did for crypto, and that was literally printing money
Yeah and like the dude in front of my on the airplane who was using ChatGPT as a relationship therapist is probably never going to figure it out.
companies using AI to build therapy bots must have ironclad terms
tbh the thing that will break it, to me, is the financials not working. Open AI literally can't make money on $200/month/seat headcount. Google is talking about a 20k/month cost for their "elite" or whatever plan. The fact that no one is making money here except OpenAI and Anthropic, and the money they're making isn't actually making them anything means that at some point something's gotta give
We're already seeing tha ton an institutional level - like Builder.com and that company that 'leveled up' to human support after trying AI.
i do wonder if the mass layoffs will impact it at some point. capitalissm needs labor, and if too many people are unemployed, none of these companies will actually function.
and you're seeing some of the financial insolvency come up. Softbank can't get people to loan it the money to fulfil its investement, a lot of money is tied up in OpenAI moving from a non-profit, MSFT pulled back it's compute and data center growth
i wonder how my high school econ teacher is doing trying to teach through all of this.
Humans need a purpose… work supplies that for the vast majority of people. Humans without purpose for too long become malcontent
yes?
there’s a lack (artificial or otherwise) of work
It’s a general statement. I do think that new jobs will fill that void
With gentleness, I think the idea that jobs will just magically appear without effort on the part of companies is what's been killing the Support world for the last couple of years
And I'm sure other roles as well
the disappearance of actual entry level roles
The market is not self-correcting, no matter what Tech says. It requires intention, and if the intention is that our jobs will be replaced by AI and that the rest will somehow just magically sort itself out, we'll be as screwed then as we are now
'The market' is not sentient. It doesn't care that people need jobs to survive.
The stark reality is that certain people will always find a way to land on their feet, but many of us (non-male, non-white, etc.) don't have that luxury
So hearing "new jobs will fill that void' is pretty frustrating, as someone who's spent the last few years watching the job market closely. It's just not true.
I may have a downer view, but would love someone to challenge me on it. I think the crux of AI in terms of Support Jobs specifically, is that those running the companies don't, and never have, actually cared about the quality of support they provide. Support (in their eyes) is the necessary evil they have to supply their customers. But the role of support isn't to actually fix any problems, it's to do just enough to keep the customers from leaving their platform/product/whatever. So although we know AI is providing a subpar level of quality, the business owners are banking on the consumers to just acquiesce to the new level of normal. (as they did 20+ years ago when IVRs became the new, awful norm).
So my worry is that, until it is profitable for companies to actually give a shit, this is the path.
i think that is probably true for some places.
depending on who mandates that support needs to be using ai, it could be a blessing or a curse
and it’s being used for, how it’s being used, managed, etc, is variable depending on who has decided to introduce it
smaller vc backed companies who aren’t actually customer centric are less likely to care about this until it’s probably too late for them
yeah. Which, I don't get. I would think the smaller companies would realize how hungry people are for quality service and are generally willing to pay for it if needed.
they often don’t equate service with the product or platform they’re building
customers complaining just don’t understand their vision
GAWD this. THIS
have had founders say this to me. “we have to be opinionated and move forward” while losing active users by the thousands
MVP no longer really includes the V. Founders and VCs are still high on stories from a different time when you could ship a fundamentally broken application that barely worked and print money. The hockystick growth is over, now it's just a normal ass mature field and they hate that (hence Crypto, Web3, NFTs, DeFI, "AI", etc). It's a bunch of people standing around a trashed hotel room asking when the party is starting.
So..... how much longer do we have to live in this before we see change. I'm tired y'all
girl, same
but also probably a while longer
I'm curious how this specific cycle makes it into mid 2026 tbh, but the beatings will continue until customers buy the slop or the next fad shows up
I'm this close to leaning into my mid-life crisis and just writing a book (non work related) and living off my garden
yea, we’ve got some elections coming up this year that i’m curious to see how they might impact things
on this article - I listened to a podcast the other day (honestly can't remember which one) but Simon Sinek was the guest and he was talking about how a very famous CEO he knows is constantly talking in public how great AI is going to be for everyone but in private, to his friends, he's telling everyone he doesn't believe any of what he's saying publicly and actually thinks things are going to be brutal for the majority of people for a long time, including due to his AI product.
Swell
Yep, that tracks. I have not heard from anyone who thinks the products they're using actually work. They're just certain they will *someday* You know a technology is essential when leaders have to mandate that their orgs use it 🙃
i think a lot about how lars ulrich lost his fucking mind over people downloading his music from napster. and the very televised legal proceeding to manage all of that. and then how policy changes, or people who are in charge of policy, have made that a same argument for AI seem like we’re handcuffing di vinci.
lolol napster. There's a name I haven't heard of in a minute. Were you also a fellow lime wire user?
i preferred limewire, my computer(s) never recovered.
same
there are also songs, to this day, I'm not 100% sure I associate with the correct artist
Myspace and Limewire. I'd say take me back, but I can't do low rise jeans again. I just can't.
But the Napster example is also a tale of the obliteration of an industry through technology. It took 20+ years, but record labels are all but a husk of their former selves… these days you have artists largely owning their own music and making streaming deals. That’s objectively a good thing in most people eyes, but it did destroy a record label industry that employed large numbers of people. I don’t know what a similar process for AI will look like, but there will be a process.
I'd argue it's only good for the big stars
streaming, as much as I am a consumer and part of the problem. It's hard for new artists to make any money on streaming
my cousin is an audio engineer and all you have to do is say Spotify and you can sit back for an hour and listen to him angrily talk about streaming
Move to streaming is what hurt the music biz most, not the move to digital. Also want to add that yes while it’s more popular for artists to own their IP these days, record labels are raking in billions of dollars and so are artist services companies. I used to work for one of the billion dollar AS companies. Music biz is still one of the strongest, most evil economies out there. Artists largely do not own their copyrights. And when they do, they sell or lease them for long periods of time to unlock access to capital which they need to fund their careers. So sure the richest artist on earth could afford to buy back her masters, but the reality for the vast majority of musicians is that 1. Owning your rights doesn’t mean shit if you can’t access capital without selling/leasing 2. They aren’t making money on streaming, hard stop. Not the artists or the labels. They ARE making money on publishing deals, but pub is an extremely complex industry that even most music biz experts don’t know much about. Me included.
Record industry employment is real strong these days. The majors pivoted and learned how to control streaming. UMG’s partial ownership of Spotify is a great example of that conflict of interest. There was a tough period during transition about 10 years ago but otherwise recorded music is hot hot hot babyyyyyy. I wouldn’t call it destroyed, it’s just much much different than it was.
I feel like if I didn’t live in Nashville, I wouldn’t know anything about publishing. It’s all about sync licensing in this town
Yes!! Sync is the secret to success for small artists!
