Opinion | What happens when the professional class loses out to AI?

This turnaround devastated workers and communities, and even college-bound kids like me absorbed the sadness — through songs such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” through shows such as “Roseanne.” As we entered the electorate, it became a major force in our politics, as the Clintons tried to steer the economy toward a global, postindustrial future.

Voting for Bill Clinton, I believed his answers were correct. Trade and automation made Americans better off overall, even as they displaced some manufacturing workers. What we needed to do was finesse the adjustment, primarily by sending more kids to college to capitalize on the growing wage premium — 40 percent when I was born, 60 percent when I graduated college, and closer to 80 percent today. Older workers who weren’t ready to become college freshman could be retrained for booming service sector jobs.

I still think our prescriptions were broadly correct. But as artificial intelligence starts coming for our jobs, I wonder how well the professional class will take its own medicine. Will we gracefully transition to lower-skilled service work, as we urged manufacturing workers to do? Or will we fight like hell to retain what we have, for our children as well as ourselves?

For I suspect AI is coming for a lot of professional class jobs, despite how many people I hear say a machine can never do what they do. We’re accustomed to think of automation as primarily displacing the working class, but as economist Daron Acemoglu wrote in 2002, “the idea that technological advances favor more skilled workers is a 20th-century phenomenon”; in the 19th century, steam-driven machines replaced a lot of skilled artisans, and AI currently looks to be pointed in a similar direction. If you work with words and symbols, AI can already do a surprising amount of what you can do — and it is improving with terrifying speed.

As a Bloomberg News headline put it in February, “AI Is Driving More Layoffs Than Companies Want to Admit.” And though the numbers aren’t enormous — Bloomberg cites one source that found 4,600 AI-related layoffs during the previous nine months — that’s a pretty big number considering that ChatGPT was released to the public only in November 2022. It’s going to get bigger still.

As with previous rounds of automation, good jobs will be created as well as destroyed, and even those who don’t get them will enjoy broadly rising prosperity. But that was also true for manufacturing workers displaced by the China shock — as people like me kept telling them. A report last year from the Congressional Budget Office notes that though incomes “increased most among households in the highest quintile” between 1979 and 2020, average incomes increased in all quintiles.

Yet as they kept telling us, people don’t care only about their role as consumers; they care about their role as producers and, more broadly, about their relative place in society. For the working class, that place has been eroding, in relative terms, for decades. The kinds of jobs many of them now occupy — in retail, say, or on the lower rungs of the health-care system — have less social status than the old manufacturing jobs even when they pay as well. And they often require a combination of servility and soft skills that wasn’t demanded on an assembly line.

Those people might be happier if AI improves their relative position — taking over an increasing share of high-status, high-paid knowledge work, while leaving humans the lower-skill tasks it still struggles with, such as chopping vegetables or helping an elderly person use the bathroom. In theory, perhaps, we should all be happier, as this would be what political leaders have long claimed they wanted: a return to the mid-century paradise when the college wage premium was modest, opportunity was broadly distributed, and incomes were compressed into a narrow band.

But if so, we are also likely to see a revolt of the educated people who are losing ground, similar to the revolt that led the working class to embrace protectionism, and Donald Trump. Or at least that’s how it seems to me, when I try to imagine the upper middle class offering their own kids the advice they’ve so liberally dispensed to working-class men: “I’m sorry, but the jobs your parents had aren’t going to be around, and it’s time to face reality and look for steady work in food service or a warehouse.”

“I’d be fine with that!” some educated parent will inevitably write me, “as long as they have good health insurance and a strong social safety net.” I applaud those public-minded people, but, realistically, I doubt they’re the majority. For most upper-middle-class families, I expect there will be a lot of outrage and fear, and demands that the government do something to help them maintain their position and pass what they have onto their children.

Since the knowledge workers are a lot closer to the centers of power than the manufacturing workers were, I expect the twilight of the elites will feature even fiercer and more destructive political battles than the ones we are currently enduring — a Ragnarok of the reasoning class, if you will, an Armageddon of the academically inclined.