There’s a new acronym reshaping how workers think about their careers: FOBO: the fear of becoming obsolete. Unlike traditional job insecurity, FOBO isn’t about getting fired. It’s about becoming irrelevant. Four in 10 workers now name AI-driven job loss as one of their primary fears—a share that has nearly doubled in a single year, according to KPMG. Sixty-three percent say AI will make the workplace feel less human. Skill demands in AI-exposed roles are shifting 66% faster than they did just one year ago. In 2026, FOBO became the defining psychological condition of the American workplace.
After Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, claimed last year that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar positions within five years, he was joined within months by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who offered a similar outlook. More recently, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said that AI leaders themselves have been surprised and alarmed at the pace of disruption, and they are “literally consciously pulling back on their predictions because of the short-term economic disruption.” Warner put the new college grad unemployment at 35% within two years.
