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Joel Kotkin: When the AI revolution is over, trades may be the only jobs left

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The biggest long-range danger looming over the remaining liberal democracies does not come from U.S. President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin or the nutty mullahs in Iran now being pummelled. Instead, it comes from the seemingly inexorable force of technology that increasingly threatens not just to aid humanity, but replace it.

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No matter what the political class proposes, artificial intelligence is poised to dominate our lives. Two-fifths of young Americans — the group most likely to be impacted by AI in the workforce — are willing to turn government over to it, according to a 2025 survey for the Heartland Institute. That’s a scary thought since, in war game scenarios, AIs tend to opt for nuclear war. Good thing AI is not running the Iran war!

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Of course, AI can also provide some benefits, as a tool for medical breakthroughs and more efficient manufacturing. But it likely will also amplify our already serious “addiction” to screens and erode our privacy even further.

This is not primarily about national power, which may be a good thing as Canada, despite excellent research capacity and 1,500 firms competing in the space, is not going to determine the future of the technology.

Canada ranks eighths in Tortoise’s latest Global AI Index. Yet the U.S., with its ability to raise trillions for AI, dominates along with China, where the cadres are desperate to exploit the new technology. The real winners, however, are not nations but mega-corporations. The top tech firms are already bigger than most countries; put together, their valuation exceeds China’s GDP. Apple alone has a market cap that’s higher than Canada’s GDP.

This global dominance stems from the fact that an estimated 2.5-billion people around the world own smartphones that run on their technologies. The tech oligarchs further bolster their market domination through massive lobbying operations. They are now like the barons at Runnymede, with more power and influence than any executive authority. In financial terms, they also dominate Wall Street’s investment economy, which rises and falls on the latest speculations on the technology.

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Yet for all the enthusiasm, the public is far from sanguine about AI’s rise. Roughly three in five Americans, according to a 2023 poll, see it as a direct threat to civilization. Job fears are intense, as AI will clearly accelerate the loss of some blue-collar positions.

MIT predicts that at least 10 per cent of all U.S. jobs are at risk. Such worries are shared by the graduate students I teach with Marshall Toplansky about the impact of artificial intelligence. They expressed the most concern for white-collar jobs like human resources, media and video games.

Yet just as AI can create robotic nannies and sex bots, even those of us at universities could see jobs erode further in our already tottering educational system by making human instruction far less relevant. It can also assume roles that duplicate professionals, including famous psychologists. Who needs a contemporary human shrink when you can lie down and talk with Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung?

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If in the past blue collar workers were victims of automation, now the disruption may fall on the traditionally comfortable professional classes.  Even “geeks” who write software code may find out that they, too, are vulnerable to what economists refer to as “skill-based technological change.”

“We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” Atif Rafiq, former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo, told the Wall Street Journal in 2023. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.”

The threat to “creative jobs” — artists, actors, screenwriters, journalists — could be felt soon in Canada‘s $12-billion film and television industry, which employs 240,000 people. Artificial musicians and actors are already scoring big wins with audiences. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the early developers of AI and a former Google executive, suggested that AI’s capacity to create convincing false images and texts is ushering in a world where people will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

This technology is likely to exacerbate class conflicts throughout the West. In the U.S., we have an economy that’s growing, but requires fewer people. Soaring profits at big tech firms have been accompanied by massive layoffs, including at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft. Even startups like Block, a fintech company run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, recently laid off nearly half its workforce.

As writer Matthew B. Crawford put it, the political implications of allowing AI to gain “ownership of the means of thinking” could be profound. We seem headed to an emerging new dark ages where even supposedly educated people can no longer think on their own, and are subject to all kinds of conspiracy theories.

It will likely be the left-wing political parties — Liberals in Canada, Democrats in America and Labor in Australia — that are most affected. After all, their political base in the educated professional classes is the most threatened. The lack of upwardly mobile jobs, diminishing affordability and discontent over the tech oligarchs’ massive fortunes have become a rallying cry for neo-socialists in places like New York, which just elected a socialist mayor.

The creative-class progressives are likely to break with the liberal establishment, which tends to see AI in favourable terms. The reliably liberal Brookings Institution predicts a huge productivity “boom” from AI. Big Democratic-leaning oligarchs like Reid Hoffman promise that AI will serve to the cause of  “elevating humanity.”

Maybe so, but as John Maynard Keynes noted, “In the long run we are all dead.” So who survives the AI onslaught? Some elite AI engineers could experience a windfall, until they are surpassed by their own machines. Big global investors could become much richer, at least until the bubble pops.

More surprisingly, skilled manual labourers, with hands-on physical jobs like mechanics or oil riggers, which are difficult to replace with robots, could also benefit from work on massive data centres and the energy infrastructure needed to run them.

Whether located in Saskatoon or San Antonio, this class of worker could be the unlikely winners of an AI-driven economy. Young people might do well to forget former U.S. president Joe Biden’s famous advice to “learn to code.” Say goodbye to “my son, the radiologist” or computer geek, and hello to “my son, the plumber.”

In its drive to dehumanize the world, AI will create some winners and many losers. Where it ends up no one can really guess, but it’s going to be a tough ride.

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