Jobs

For Some Americans, AI Is Coming to Take Your Job, and You Can't Stop It

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: January 10, 2025 9:15 am

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a threat to jobs across many industries. If you work in one of them, you’re not going to stop it. That is the conclusion of a huge report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The WEF’s annual report is titled the Future of Jobs, and the new version is for 2025. The study looks at perceptions of 1,000 employers who represent 14 million workers in 55 industries.

Who Will Be Out of Work?

Which jobs will be hit the hardest? Postal workers, executive secretaries, and payroll clerks. The effects will be across the board among people with jobs that require modest skills. On the other side of the coin are people who can design the AI tools that will replace these workers. “Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market — driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,” the researchers wrote.

These trends will hit some of the largest employers in America, if the yardstick in the report is correct. People who work at Walmart, which is America’s largest employer, are at risk. This is particularly true of people who work at lower levels in its over 4,600 stores. It also includes store workers at McDonald’s, which is also among America’s largest employers. The U.S. Postal Service employs over 600,000 people.

How broad are the effects of AI over the next decade? Forty-one percent of companies plan to “downsize” by using AI between 2025 and 2030, the WEF forecasts.

The challenge for people who are not technologists is whether they can be “upscaled” to the extent that their skills become valuable and technical. Some workers simply do not have to background to do that.

The Jobs Apocalypse

The Guardian reports that Americans face a jobs apocalypse that could rob 40 million people in the United States of their livelihoods. The total employee base in the United States is just over 160 million people. That puts 25% of all American workers at risk of being unemployed because of AI  within the next decade. If any additional proof is necessary, the study of employment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at occupations between 2023 and 2033 and shows a pattern similar to the one from the WEF.

Millions of Americans will lose their jobs to automation in the next decade. If you work in one of the affected industries, get ready.

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