Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence (AI) boom has sparked widespread panic about the future of human labor, a moment summed up by AI executive Matt Shumer’s viral essay likening this moment in white-collar work to February 2020, before the pandemic devastated American life.
Shumer warned that white-collar workers have to figure out plan B right now, because a Covid-like extinction event is coming for white-collar work. Almost simultaneously, Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman gave it 18 months before anyone looking at a computer for a living will be out of work within that timeframe. This was a revival of sorts for the sort of doomsday predictions that marked the first half of 2025 before going ominously silent. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, for instance, predicted that AI would eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, while Ford CEO Jim Farley said it would wipe out half of white-collar jobs, full-stop.
