“Godfather of AI” Says Half of White-Collar Jobs Will Vanish

Additional Resources

• AI Warning From Geoffrey Hinton
• Low-Hire, Low-Fire Job Market for Who?
• Q4 2025 AI Perception and Threat in the Workplace Survey
• ADP’s Employee Motivation and Commitment Index (EMCI)

Transcript

Pete Newsome: 0:00

Today’s job market headlines include a warning from the godfather of AI during a talk at Georgetown and employers hiring fewer people. But first, if you want to know what workers really feel right now, it can be summed up in one word. Worse. ADP’s latest employee motivation and commitment index, which they call the EMCI, fell again in November. It’s now at 145, which marks the third straight monthly decline. Five of the ten sectors they measure lost ground. Real estate took the biggest hit, dropping 16 points, and professional, scientific, and technical services fell nine points. Now, surprisingly, it wasn’t all bad news. Transportation and warehousing hit an all-time high at 166, and construction climbed, which has been a steady rise since uh the summer. Sentiment generally follows how the job market is going, so these numbers didn’t surprise me at all.

0:52

When hiring picks up, the EMCI scores will too. The question is, how long will we have to wait until that begins? The next headline tells us hiring is cooled, but layoffs haven’t spiked. So what’s going on? According to Glassdoor’s chief economist Daniel Zow, we’re in a low hire, low fire environment right now. And I agree with him, all the data that I’ve seen supports that. Hiring is stalled, but layoffs are still below pre-COVID levels. We just haven’t seen aggressive cuts at scale, at least not yet. But there’s consequences to this situation. And what I mean by that is when things don’t move, those who have been laid off or have left their jobs for any reason makes it harder to get another one. And there’s more competition as a result, specifically at injury level, because new grads they’re trying to enter the workforce. People with more experience are going after those same jobs right now.

1:44

So that’s creating a mess. And then on top of all that, if you are currently employed and you’d like to move, there’s just nowhere to go. And you’re having a difficult time moving up in your organization because people aren’t leaving. So this is a bad cycle that we’re in, no question about it. And if you’re an employer, all of this should tell you that it’s a bad idea to assume that your team has stayed because they’re happy. They might be happy, but in many cases they’re staying because they just don’t have another job to go to. So don’t take your employees for granted. Train them, prepare them for the future. And if you’ve listened to me at all, you’ll know that that means getting them ready for AI. And a recent survey that we did backed that up. 78% of employees who took our survey said that they would consider switching jobs or have already done so for better training and opportunities with AI.

2:35

And 62% said they’ve already been thinking about it, especially younger workers. Gen Z in particular is ready to move if there’s better opportunity, specifically in the AI space. So if you act now and you prepare, you’re going to have a much better chance of retaining your team when the pendulum swings back the other way. And the last big headline today the godfather of AI says it will replace more jobs than it creates, and it’s going to happen soon. Now, this is from a talk yesterday at Georgetown. It was Bernie Sanders on stage with Jeffrey Hinton. He’s a literal Nobel Prize Award winner for his work with machine learning. So he really is an expert in the truest sense in this space. And it was a really interesting conversation. It’s on YouTube. I recommend listening to it. It was called AI The Promise and Peril. And here’s the spoiler: they spent most of the time that they were on stage talking about the peril side, especially when it comes to jobs. Hinton was brutally direct.

3:33

He said the whole business model of the biggest AI companies boils down to one thing, and that’s replacing human labor so they can sell the same or better output for a fraction of the payroll cost. And Bernie, who’s very concerned about what AI is going to mean to job displacement, and I’m with him about that. He asked about tech billionaires like Elon and Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, whether Hinton thinks that they’re worried about putting millions of people out of work. And Hinton came back to that and said they should be worried, but I don’t think they are. And many of them haven’t really absorbed that if the workers don’t get paid, there’s nobody left to buy their products. They haven’t thought through the massive social disruption we’ll get with very high unemployment. Bernie shared some comments from some other technology leaders. Bill Gates said that we’re heading into a world where humans won’t be needed for most things. And the CEO of Anthropic, and they’re the company behind Claude, recently told Congress that AI could eliminate roughly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next three to five years.

4:38

And when hearing Bernie make those statements, Hinton didn’t push back on any of it. In fact, he nodded along and said those forecasts are probably about right. They both agreed the disruption won’t just be coming for a truck driver and factory worker jobs. We’ve heard that for years that robots are coming to take those. But instead, it’s coming fastest for the roles that college students are training for right now. Software development, legal research, financial analysis, marketing, you know, even things like radiology if you’re going to med school and middle management. So that is a huge concern with this, according to these guys. Bernie polled the audience at one point and he asked the Georgetown students that uh to raise their hand if they thought AI was going to help their future career, and almost nobody did.

5:26

And then he asked them to raise their hands if they think it’s going to hurt their career. And almost every hand went up. And that supports our recent survey data. This shows 34% of Gen Z employees are highly concerned about AI posing a threat to their jobs within the next three years. And while nobody knows exactly what’s coming, I believe those who are paying attention are the ones who are going to fare better. The market has already changed and it’s only going to pick up speed. And pretending otherwise just won’t help. So pay close attention. Don’t rely on your employer, your school, your professors. Educate yourself. Embrace the tools. Use them. Figure out how to apply them to make you better at whatever it is you’re doing. That will increase your potential to stay ahead of the curve. Because right now, the future isn’t predetermined, but it’s definitely accelerating. And here’s a fun fact before we close, or maybe a not so fun fact.

6:22

I probably should reconsider how I phrase this each day. But here it is. The lowest paying jobs in the US are food prep and serving. No surprise, they also have the highest turnover. So if you’re a restaurateur, if you’re in that space, maybe you should shift how you pay your team. I don’t know how many organizations are doing that out there, but I know that high turnover replacing employees comes at such a cost. Maybe you should just pay them better, happier employees, better customer service, probably better food as a result, too. Everyone wins. So there is our show for today. Thanks for listening. Please like, subscribe, and share with anyone you think might be interested. And as always, I welcome your feedback. Talk to you soon.