ChatGPT’s most advanced models recently served me a surprising statistic: US productivity grew faster in 2024 than in any year since the 1960s. Half that jump can be linked to generative AI tools that most workers hadn’t even heard of two years earlier.

The only problem is that it’s not true. The AI made it up.

Despite its much-documented fallibility, generative AI has become a huge part of many people’s jobs, including my own. The numbers vary from survey to survey, but a June Gallup poll found that 42 percent of American employees are using AI a few times a year, while 19 percent report deploying it several times a week. The technology is especially popular with white-collar workers. While just 9 percent of manufacturing and front-line workers use AI on a regular basis, 27 percent of white-collar workers do.

Even as many people integrate AI into their daily lives, it’s causing mass job anxiety: A February Pew survey found that more than half of US employees worried about their fate at work.

Unfortunately, there is no magic trick to keep your job for the foreseeable future, especially if you’re a white-collar worker. Nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI, and leadership at many companies is responding to this uncertainty by firing workers it may or may not need in an AI-forward future.

“If AI really is this era’s steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it.”

After laying off over 6,000 workers in May and June, Microsoft is laying off 9,000 more workers this month, reportedly so the company can reduce the number of middle managers as it reorganizes itself around AI. In a note on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees that the company would “roll out more generative AI and agents” and reduce its workforce in the next few years. This was all after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar........

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