The often-talked threat of artificial intelligence on jobs suddenly became very real and shocking to Jane, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, when her human resources role became automated and she was laid off in January.
She’d spent two years at her company managing benefits and was on track for a promotion. She’d noticed her boss building out AI infrastructure, but didn’t think her position, which paid roughly $70,000 a year, would be affected.
“I thought that because I had put in so much time and been so good on the higher-level stuff, he would invest in me,” the 45-year-old Bay Area resident told The Independent about her former employer. “Then, as soon as he had a way to automate it away, he did that. He just let go of me.”
Making matters worse, current economic conditions made job hunting hard. In February, an AI system conducted one of her phone interviews.
“It was kind of like having an interview with an automated voicemail,” she said, adding that the “robot” asked her questions about herself and responded with generic answers, leaving her unhopeful the technology would help her get to the next round.
After several months unemployed, Jane obtained a government position in April, before starting a new gig in sales just a few weeks ago.
“What’s happening is there’s a huge white collar slowdown,” said Jane. “I think jobs are going away.”
Workers across the country are grappling with the same issue, as tech CEOs sound the alarm on a potential job market bloodbath in the coming years.
In an Axios interview last month, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company, predicted AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and increase unemployment to 10 to 20 percent within the next five years.
The general public is “unaware that this is about to happen,” he told the outlet. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
Perhaps no other sector has been hit harder than tech. Internet forums are flooded with workers relaying they’ve either been laid off or wondering when they might be.
Software engineer Shawn K (his full last name is K) shared his experience on Substack of getting laid off as AI took over the company, in a now-viral post titled: The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway.
In March 2024, K, 42, was a full-stack engineer at FrameVR.io. His superiors encouraged employees to use ChatGPT and team productivity skyrocketed.
A month later, he was laid off. He’d been in the industry for 21 years and was making $150,000.
“We had been reorienting the company towards AI, adding on AI features all throughout the software and trying to capitalize on AI to our customers, and then shortly after that kind of restructuring and strategizing…I got laid off,” he told The Independent.
With two mortgages to cover, he started using Door Dash to do deliveries around his home in Central New York, just to make ends meet. After more than a year and nearly 800 applications, he finally landed a contract position earlier this month.
“I’ve tried a lot of stuff, like everything I can think of, I’ve lowered my standards over this past year of all the things I’m applying for and all the things I’m willing to consider,” he said. “At some point, it gets to a situation where you need cash immediately to literally eat and pay your bills.”
K believes AI will make some tech jobs obsolete — but the worker still has a place.
“AI is a better programmer than me, and that doesn’t mean that I think that I have no value to offer anymore,” he said. “I just think that means I can now do 100 times as much as what I was doing before, and solve harder problems that I wouldn’t have even attempted before.”
Now that his article has received so much attention, he wants people to take notice of the changes coming to the industry.
“I’m really convinced that anybody whose job is done on a computer all day is over. It’s just a matter of time,” said K.
Brian Ream, a 46-year-old high school and university tutor in Michigan, ran a medical transition business until AI caused demand to dry up. The business, which only generated a few thousand dollars a year, provided English translations for Portuguese medical journals. He started the business in 2014 after spending time in Brazil and learning the language but hasn’t had an order in over a year.
He knows most of his prior customers are now using Chat GPT and worries about the implications.
“When you’re translating medical journal articles, this could have effects that are unintended,” said Ream, noting that some of his former clients could be translating articles with false medical information.
Still, he acknowledges the technology could be useful and wants other educators to incorporate it into lessons.
“I wish that teachers were more connected to the tool and were able to teach students what it’s capable of and what it’s not capable of, so they don’t try to use it for things that it can’t do,” Ream said.
“The reality is, students are using this to write whole essays, and they’re not learning how to do it themselves, so they don’t know that the tool isn’t capable of it.”
As more employers require workers to use AI, he wants the next generation to be prepared — even if it destroyed his own business.
“You cannot stop this from happening,” Ream said.
