White-collar America is having a nervous breakdown about AI

White-collar dread is everywhere. “For the first time in at least a generation," an economist said, "the future is up for grabs, and they might not end up on top”

For two decades, Kimberly Harrington thrived as a freelance copywriter and creative director, with clients including Apple $AAPL 3.14%, Netflix $NFLX 4.10%, and Nike $NKE -0.37%. She was the breadwinner for her family, working remotely and raising her children in rural Vermont. Two years ago, as the kids left home for college, she decided to look for the perfect full-time job — only to watch her prospects collapse. She went, as she put it, from carefully vetting only “the best of the best” opportunities to, “I will take anything.” 

“I've given up on any sort of dream scenario. I'm just trying to survive,” Harrington said in an interview. “I know a creative director who is a mailman now.”

Harrington is one of thousands — or, depending on how you count, millions. If you earn more than $60,000 a year, have at least some college education, and do your work on a laptop, this story is about you, too. 

Molly Kinder, a former Brookings Institution researcher who studies what’s happening to knowledge workers in the AI era, compares what’s coming for white-collar America to the collapse of the country’s manufacturing sector that began in the 1980s. That collapse cost roughly eight million blue-collar jobs over three decades and hollowed out entire towns. 

The next crisis is here for white-collar knowledge workers: credentialed, skilled, and accustomed to being well compensated for their abilities to design corporate websites, hit corporate sales targets, or write corporate marketing copy. Until recently, such skills were a golden ticket to the “best paid and most coveted jobs in the economy,” as Kinder puts it. These skills carried workers through the dot-com era, the smartphone explosion, and the pandemic hiring frenzy — always riding the next wave, often pulling down six figures, solidly within the top 10% of earners.

Now, suddenly, the old assumptions don’t apply. “For the first time in at least a generation — perhaps two — the future is up for grabs, and there's a chance that they might not end up on top,” Aaron Terrazas, the former chief economist of Glassdoor, said of white-collar workers. 

The result is a kind of class shock, hitting millions of people all at once. White-collar dread is everywhere you look. One social media post declaring that “something big is happening” went viral earlier this year, racking up 90 million views on X $TWTR 0.00% alone. A Substack post predicting mass AI-driven unemployment captured so much attention that it briefly tanked the actual stock market. Dark jokes about how you only have two more years to “start a podcast or become part of the permanent underclass” have gone mainstream.

The data suggests many already dread what’s coming. The New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations has found that expectations of broader unemployment are skyrocketing — most sharply among more educated, higher-income people.

For Harrington, the speed of the change in the job market is part of the shock: “You start to feel the fear that other people have been feeling forever.” 

'A full-blown panic attack'

Others shared their own experiences of dread in interviews with Quartz, speaking on condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to jeopardize their job prospects or current employment.

A graphic designer in her 30s, who works at a marketing firm in the South, said she had already lost one role  — with her employer........

© Quartz