Worth Reading – Employment data shows the early signs of AI job disruption are already here
I’ve been seeing a lot of this in the media lately:
For decades, US job growth was led by white-collar work. But over the past three years, that pattern has shifted: my analysis reveals that blue-collar employment has added roughly one million more jobs than white-collar roles, with manual work rising modestly as office-based employment edges down.
As always, when there is a technological disruption to the workforce, the easy answer is reskilling, but it’s never that easy. The AI hype and the eagerness to cut labor costs are creating a very sudden disruption for hundreds of thousands of workers in the US.
While there may be growth opportunities in blue-collar industries, you don’t suddenly become a plumber or electrician. It’s a long learning process that doesn’t scale well for that many unemployed people. This is reskilling at a massive, rapid scale, but we have to admit that whatever reskilling we’ve done in the past hasn’t been that good.
Do we expect what we’ve done before to ever match current and future needs? I don’t think it will, and that’s a problem that should be addressed. We need different, serious ideas, but I don’t see many of them out there.
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