What jobs, exactly, is so-called "artificial intelligence" supposed to revolutionize, and for whose benefit?
The answers to those rarely-asked questions have become increasingly clear in recent months, as the looming threat of AI automation appears to be taking a concrete toll on the workforce. The bombshell July jobs report has finally confirmed what many US workers have been feeling for months: it's almost impossible to find meaningful employment anymore.
With just 73,000 nonfarm jobs added to the economy in July and a pitiful 33,000 over May and June, it seems the early days of the AI era aren't all they're cracked up to be — at least not for us, the worker bees keeping the whole hive from coming apart at the seams. As Time Magazine's Philip Elliott recently wrote, workers in the richest country on the planet are now in uncharted waters.
Since 2005, service workers have made up the bulk of the US labor force, contributing 80 percent of the nation's GDP. Though the service industry has historically struggled to find workers — thanks in large part to low wages at corporate chains — that trend is now beginning to reverse, with recent college graduates struggling to find work at places like Starbucks and Costco. That's a stark benchmark, with especially grim implications for the over 45 million US citizens who never had the privilege of attending college.
Joining them in the blender are entry-level white collar workers, graduate students and specialized tech workers such as coders and analysts. According to the Financial Times, massive firms like Microsoft — once a dependable landing pad for STEM workers — are seeing quarterly profits skyrocket by as much as 25 percent, even as it cuts jobs by the thousands.
That particular trend in STEM hiring has been months — if not years — in the making. In May, a software engineer with 20 years of experience made headlines after tech industry layoffs had relegated him to flipping junk on eBay to afford the trailer he was now living out of.
But to answer the question of why — and for whose benefit — workers are struggling, we need to look beyond the tech industry hype into the moves made by those calling the shots.
One major factor at play is the executive angst over AI returns. Over the last few years, AI adoption has become a major conversation in boardrooms across the country. But so far, AI has been a wildly unprofitable money pit, as buggy rollouts and large language model (LLM) hallucinations catch major corporations off guard.
Yet at the end of the day, the number has to go up — such is life under capitalism. This led to some chaotic scenes earlier in the year, with some firms begging their staff to return, and others either contracting temporary "AI fixers," or just doubling down.
As the FT flagged, corporate executives are finally getting their act together and converging on a single narrative: "revenue per employee" must go up.
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