Andrew Yang
“Do you spend most of your day sitting in front of your PC? Take this very seriously.” Former US presidential candidate predicts “great dismantling” for the next 12 to 18 months.
Here comes one “great dismantling of office jobs”, and the spoilsport is Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The founder of the Forward party and former US presidential candidate, Andrew Yangthe alarm has once again sounded in the job market, but this time, the ‘bomb’ predicted is already for the next 12 to 18 months: this is the horizon in which a wave of layoffs of millions of white-collar workers is expected.
The message was published this Monday in its newsletter, on the platform, where it predicted that “millions” of workers “have to prepare for an extremely difficult situation, which will affect different generations“.
“Do you spend much of your day sitting at a desk looking at a computer?” “Take this very seriously,” he wrote: “Millions of workers are about to receive their layoff notices.”
The main targets are office jobs and roles that spend a large part of the day in front of a computer. But the former candidate identifies the specific groups he sees as most vulnerable: mid-career office workers, middle managers, call center professionals, marketing specialists and programmers.
The American politician describes a scenario in which unemployment among middle-aged professionals will become visible: a scenario in which cafes like Starbucks could fill with former office workers, looking for alternatives.
“This wave of automation will shed millions of office workers in the next 12 to 18 months“, wrote Yang. “When a company begins to restructure itself, all its competitors will follow suit.”
“This will become a competition, because the stock market will reward those who reduce the number of employees and punish those who don’t”, he warned, quoted by .
And the impact, he adds, will be felt even by those who don’t lose their jobs.
“Let’s say you own a dry cleaner, dog walker or hairdresser. If people in your community stop going to the office, your business will suffer because there will be fewer dress shirts to wash, people will walk their dogs at home and they will reduce visits to the beauty salon”, he pointed out: “The amount of money paid to human labor is about to decrease.”
The billionaire has been warning about the effects of automation for years. In 2018, in an interview with The New York Times, he even anticipated that autonomous vehicles could replace truck drivers.
