'White-collar' is too blurry a category to measure AI's toll on workers

The term lumps together workers with vastly different AI exposure — and that makes the crisis harder to see in the data

The term "white-collar" is widely credited to the sociologist Upton Sinclair, who a century ago used it to describe salaried workers who didn't get their hands dirty. For most of the 20th century, it served as a reasonable proxy for a class of workers defined by education, desk work, and relative job security.

Almost 100 years later, that category is doing too much work — and its imprecision may be one reason the economic disruption AI is inflicting on knowledge workers is so difficult to measure and so easy to underestimate.

One label, radically different exposure

Consider who gets grouped under "white-collar" today: a senior software engineer at a large tech firm, a first-year paralegal at a law firm, a junior equity........

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