US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
bloomberg.com106 points by elsewhen 2 hours ago
106 points by elsewhen 2 hours ago
> A group of 18 occupations flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as exposed to AI, accounting for about 10 million jobs, saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025, according to annual data published Friday. That compared with an increase in overall employment of 0.8% over the same period.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2024/article/industry-and-occup...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
The article that flags AI risk still projects that the top 15 growth employment through 2033 contains software related jobs like Computer / Information Research Scientists, Data Scientists, Operations Research analysts.
The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.
Almost like the whole “learn how to code” thing was a play. Commoditize your complement and all.
I think people are blaming AI for a recession caused by trump’s tarrifs and the oil crisis. Businesses fear that oil prices may explode until enough of the economy enters a recession that oil demand decreases, and are already feeling the supply crunch
This comment is completely divorced from the facts given in the article.
The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.
Those are the same roles that get axed first in any recession. Anything under “SG&A” is overhead that can be reduced.
Indeed, it's exactly what you'd expect if more people quit buying stuff.
If you replace customer service with LLMs I will look for a way to stop doing business with you.
You will probably be in the minority, and that minority will keep shrinking as AI keeps improving.
Why care if "unthinking execution of a generic customer service script" is performed by an interpreter made of silicon or flesh?
Neither has any free will to deviate from the script. Both are useless in any case that's not handled by the script. The silicon one has better wait times though.
Defending the sociopath overlords: truly a warrior's flex...
It's depressing to see logic and reasoning in discussion replaced with name-calling and tribalism.
"You're on the side of the <insert pejorative descriptive here>" should rarely (if ever) be a valid rebuttal.
Are the jobs going away because of AI being applied or is AI being applied because those jobs are going away? You see lots of life jackets being worn as a ship is sinking; doesn't mean people putting on the life jackets made the ship sink.
In economies that revolve around credit/debt (the US), once credit stops EXPANDING, that's a huge force pushing the economy down.
If everyone's already taken on as much debt as they can, and interest rates aren't consistently marching lower for ~25 straight years, it's going to be a little harder to grow.
Doesn't make it impossible, just harder.
We're paying for growth we got 25 years ago now.
Wish we invested that money better. You can't change the past. But you can change the future.
This is precisely why DJT wants to control the Fed and lower interest rates. It would be a short-term win for him and the economy.
The future will certainly change things, but who can change the direction of a tidal wave? It will go where it wants, not where we want. The best a single individual can do is flee to higher ground.
Unless you happen to have a media empire at your disposal. Maybe then you can change the future. The problem is that those people are changing things for the worse.
We have an invention that aims to replace labor and employers want nothing more than to replace labor. It's silly to pretend that AI isn't responsible. But you're right that an incompetent administration is piling on with additional factors.
AI isn't ready to replace us but employers are more than ready to use it as cover for laying off all the dingdongs they hired during the pandemic. I give up. I'm rich and out of f***s and the hilarity of VC approaching me to invest in their idiocy will never be lost on me given they wouldn't spare a dime when I was a disruptive young turk.
^ this! And higher interest rates than before Over hiring from Covid is still an overhang
At this point, the interest rates have been around for quite a while and the ultralow rates after the GFC should not be treated as any kind of norm.
GDP is not suffering — quite the opposite, 2% real annual growth in Q1 — so recession is definitionally inaccurate.
We’ll need new terms if Musk and Altman make infinity GDP and everyone else is unemployable.
Let's use percentage of people below the poverty line ( the actual poverty line is estimated between 97k(single) - 145k(family with children)
Anybody reading hackernews that cares about GDP growth is profoundly misinformed.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-needed-get-ahead-145k-ha...
As a Brit, it seems hilarious that a single person with an income of $97k would be on the poverty line. That's more than double the median income for all households in the UK. A lot of Americans don't seem to realise how fantastically wealthy they are compared to the rest of the world.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
2% is not the opposite of suffering. It's suffering-adjacent. It loses ground to China.
The US GDP per capita is still well ahead of China. The fact that China is catching up is not a problem for the US.
On its own terms, 2% isn't great. It's kind of the bare minimum. Anything less is losing ground in absolute terms, since that's the target for inflation as well.
That's also assuming the number is trustworthy. The number is a mediocre metric to start with, and I don't trust the administration to be calculating it correctly. They have shot the messenger more than once, after which the messages started to improve with no change in policy.
I would also not that China's numbers are even more opaque and less reliable.
Real GDP growth in Q4 was 0.5%, so it’s a heck of a lot better than that.
2% is average for past decade+.
Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word. I also think the fixation on Trump is misleading and takes away from the actual structural side effects of dollar issuance via unbacked fiat. It's convenient scapegoating to take your attention away from the long lingering issue of US dollar dominance and debt that is now causing large social divide and standard of living.
The physics of a reserve currency is that it reverts to zero through endless supply to fuel the engine to accelerate inequality at home and abroad. You see that an increasingly smaller club of people are politically opposed yet benefit by creating a narrative that takes your attention away from it.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
It shouldn't require pointing out, but asset prices are not a measure of economic activity. Rain amount and air temperature aren't either, if somehow somebody needs that pointed too. Those are independent things.
You are describing stagflation, that is a kind of recession. Despite all the fundamentals pointing towards it for a while, the US hasn't seen a lot of inflation (at least yet), so that's not what is happening.
The stock market isn't the economy. Note that stock prices are denominated in dollars. If the dollar price of a stock doubles, but in the same time period the value of the dollar halves, then the stock's value hasn't gone up at all. Compare the price of the Dow Jones to to gold and its value peaked in 1999, and has been nosediving for the past 18 months[0]. The ratio right now is the same as it was in late 2008. Obviously gold isn't a perfect standard candle, but given that inflation has obviously been rampant in recent years, we should obviously treat any economic metric that does not control for inflation with healthy skepticism.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-...
Cool. Now use the value of a dollar denominated in Bitcoin. Or do you only like cherry picking your statistics?
Note for others - "ATH" => "All-Time High"
Also the IATA code for the Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos, could have meant one or the other, no way to know which.
Well said.
Although the stock market isn't a reflection of the economy, the most relevant concern is the staggering 40TN+ of debt that can't ever go down as long as the dollar is the reserve currency and have no choice but to endlessly supply more dollars.
The issue with oil rising will make it completely impossible for the Federal Reserve to cut any rates and instead will either hold or raise them.
Then the stock market will have a problem; and those that have properties tied to their RSUs will start panicking.
This is the uncomfortable truth that not enough people understand and they are stuck in a loop chasing after things invented and created specifically to keep you there.
Hardly. Those 'invented things' are invented for one purpose, to make the inventor money. That's how capitalism works.
Fun fact, let's say that tomorrow, all new credit was outlawed. And by law, all existing credit would require payments that took 3 years to pay off. In this fantasy world where we ignore mortgages, my point is that salaries would diminish.
Right now, the cost of everything a person buys is factored into salary costs. Take away interest, and all those 30% interest credit card debts would eventually no longer be part of your salary. This process takes years of course, but no one would issue credit cards, if every person defaulted on them, yet if you look at where salaries really go? With a lot of people, 30%+ goes to just holding debt.
> Yet the stock market is reaching ATH, I don't think recession is the accurate word.
It did under Biden as well yet nobody had any issues claiming the economy was in terrible shape and that we were entering a potential recession. Which frankly I agreed with! The stock market tells a fraction of the story. Especially because institutional investors now dominate investment in a way they didn’t only a few decades ago. A booming stock market does not benefit “the common man” like it once did unless one believes in trickle down economics or something. Employee pensions have become rare in the private sector, matched 401(k)s used for investment are also becoming more scarce. The stock market just isn’t tied to “the average person” like it once was, relatively speaking.
I do think Biden deserves immense blame for inflation getting out of control, but I also think as usual people overlooked what the Democrat president was handed, which was a Covid economy in this case. There was going to be fallout from that for years no matter what he did. No one blames Trump for the economy he handed off either.
There’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass.
There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat with CEOs citing AI rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
That thing that reassures me is that I kind of think most people in software aren't doing much useful work anyway, so if the whole thing was really driven by hiring the fewest humans possible to get the work done, companies probably could have fired half of us even without AI.
I think the bigger issue is that management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working. Output could be higher with less people but the situation that managers have crafted is the maximum number of people with minimum level of output. Not good.
The answer to every problem at my place is: more headcount, productivity drops further and further, more headcount, more headcount.
Because that's the incentive that management faces. Their promotion is dependent upon having more headcount under them. The key metric in their resume that determines which jobs they are qualified for is how many people did they manage. They don't personally pay for that headcount. If they meet some baseline of output people don't really ask questions (or are able to judge) whether that headcount was necessary. So of course they seek more headcount.
I suspect the economy would look very different if total headcount in a manager's org was the denominator in a manager's performance review, such that if you employ 10x as many people, you better have generated 10x as much profit. But this would also have lots of unintended consequences: management would be incentivized to employ as few people as possible, which means lots of people would be out of work and would be competing with your firm.
This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.
Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.
I agree that a lot of people aren’t working at 100% and a lot of the work was probably needless busywork.
I don’t think it’s reassuring the way this goes away from AI layoffs. Just like in life, you need downtime and boredom. This is when you learn and reflect and develop taste, this is where your team steals time when an “emergency” breaks out and someone gets paged over an outage. This is where you take time to mentor the younger employees.
Relatedly, it seems that AI is entrenching cumbersome processes because it’s easy to write that extra doc, compile those notes, etc. When you make a team more lean, you’re supposed to cut out the extra process and let people work in a high-trust environment. That’s why startups are fast - everything is low process and the business has to trust employees. As companies grow, they develop all sorts of bureaucracy as scar tissue. But layoffs and cuts fail if you keep that stuff along the way.
This is a conspiracy theory, but I suspect that VC-backed tech industry overhiring circa 2020/2021 was partially done to give this impression.
I don't think so. During that time the potential of LLMs to eliminate work wasn't obvious. That was pre-hype explosion.
Most of the job losses are in tech and it all started back in late 2022 and early 2023 arguably before AI was perceived as a real threat. I think after 3 years of tech hiring melting because of all the economic uncertainty people can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Justy $0.02
Is that the case? The article says that the losses were
> led by customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople.
Losses in job categories management can claim was related to AI.
Some management may even believe AI can fully replace all work done by those positions. In some of those cases they will learn they were mistaken. The eventual rehiring of some positions will happen unevenly over time, be attributed by management to "ongoing growth" and not be reported by the media.
Honey, I overhired during the pandemic and I need a scapegoat for the layoffs!
Thats been mostly straightened out for years. This is tariffs, oil, and uncertainty more than anything.
When I worked in finance the thing that made the analysts happiest was a split election wherein neither side could accomplish much. We now have the opposite of that, and worse a capricious leader who makes huge changes without much justification or explanation. Pressing "shuffle" on the economic policy doesn't help anyone.
To finance the best government is the least effective government.
Yeah, the more data that comes out on the "AI employment disruption" the more it becomes apparent that AI is just an investor-friendly excuse to do the layoffs they were going to do anyway.
It is an executive friendly excuse.
No executive will ever want to say they made poor decisions that resulted in overhiring.
Instead, someone else's fault.
The same way for awhile the failings of certain businesses "those damn millennials refusing to spend money here" instead of "we priced ourselves out of the market".
Would like to see the numbers if we exclude healthcare jobs. I think job growth has been net-negative across the board when healthcare is excluded.
Not to worry. I've been assured many, many times that automation only ever creates more, better and higher paying jobs than it removes, and that no one but talentless bottom-feeding hacks are losing jobs to AI anyway, not the elite crème de la crème of HN. So the good times are on their way gentlemen!
Whatever happened to the "AI won't replace you; someone who uses AI will" narrative?
Has anyone done the math on how many jobs AI has to replace in order to justify current valuations? Would be interesting to see imo
There's no public valuation of any AI company.
But by the investment contracts OpenAI announced, if they replaced every white collar job in the world and captured all of their salary, they would have a P/E of ~1/70. (Assuming no costs at all.)
You decide what return horizon you are comfortable with and solve the linear equation for it. (But my numbers are from the end of last year, I haven't seen any more recent compilation of their contracts.)
I think the goal is to replace workers who cost $10,000/mo with an AI agent that costs $8,000/mo
$8000/month is way too low. If you're only spending $8000/month on AI you're in drastic danger of being replaced by a more efficient AI firm.
You should replace a team of 7 costing $70,000/mo with a team of 2 costing $30,000/mo and $100,000/mo in ai tokens.
My back of the napkin was a floor of five to ten percent just to break even with the physical buildout + a couple of years of energy bills.
> saw a 0.2% drop in employment between May 2024 and May 2025
So, the "AI job losses" just happen to be before AI started to boom, during the kickoff of largest trade war in 100 years?
They don't mention the trade war at all in the piece? And no analysis whatsoever of what other factors could have resulted in "customer service representatives and certain types of secretaries and salespeople" being let go. Who the hell writes this crap? What was the point?
It is quite clear that AI is only as useful as the person piloting it and therefore, if the job losses are due to AI, they are temporary. The C Suite folks spreading the batshit idea that AI can replace humans on LinkedIn will eventually lemming their way back to the correct side of reality.
I personally think that AI is being used as a convenient blanket to hide the plumes of smoke emanating from an economy engulfed in flames.
The problem is that the C Suite folks can hang onto their delusions longer than most people can get by without gainful employment.
This is intentional. Companies are actively trying to develop capabilities to replace humans. I am surprised there are not enough protests against this.
I am happy to see them replace humans with AI machines. However, housing, healthcare, and other insurances have become super expensive. Who is going to buy all the stuff these companies produce? Maybe, it will become a two tier economy: wealthy selling stuff to fellow wealthy people; under ground economy with bartering their trades for food, building shacks for living, flea market dentists, old Wild West style flea market medical doctors selling potions, elixirs, dry lizard oil, etc.
Exactly, the “economy” only matters because the ruling classes need the labor. If you could accomplish everything using machines you could have all the resources, beautiful vistas and global warming runway to yourself. Maybe some classical occupations exist like teachers, artisans, actors, sex workers so that the ruling class can still flex on each other.
Instead of protesting they are all getting together on Monday mornings in sf and hiking
i tried to protest forced-ai use at my company on the basis of it being a workplace hazard and was promptly emailed by their lawyers
"Follow me: a day in the life of a soup line influencer"
Am I meant to pretend that companies weren't for years beforehand using RTO to drive layoffs? They are always doing it, AI is just the cover.
This is going to be horribly embarrassing when it turns out that AI can only outcompete human labor in some roles. https://www.axios.com/2026/04/26/ai-cost-human-workers
It does not matter at this stage is an excuse for layoffs or not. The entire world should impose sanctions on the US for the largest IP theft in history until the laundering companies are illegal (and the waterways closed due to US wars are open).
If this administration works against its people and the whole world, maybe there should be a regime change. Peaceful version of Jan 6th. All the unemployed have little to lose.
Why just US and not China, France and UK? They all trained on internet text.
Let the entire world impose sanctions on China first if they care about intellectual theft
This is "AGI".
Will the people wake up?
We need a modern take of the movie "They Live". Granted, any copy would not be anywhere near as good as the original, even for a B movie, but AI is really turning into skynet (but it sucks).
If you're checking on open-registration internet forums (HackerNews in particular), you will never see "the people" wake up.
If you're arguing against "AI" on HackerNews, you might as well join the Washington Generals. You and your opinion are tolerated only as long as there is a more popular pro-AI opinion in the replies to your comment.
In my observation, HN is rapidly turning into an extremely bitter and cynical anti-AI echo chamber.
They Live was a product of its time. We live in our time, so instead we've got Sorry to Bother You.
I'm not sure what 'film' America is trying to be but I've seen plenty of real life references that could have come straight from either the Handmaids Tale, Idiocracy, The Dead Zone or Civil War the past few years. Life does seem to imitate art sometimes.
Discussions about this topic need to separate "AI" and aAI.
- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.
- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.
Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.
Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.
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All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages which maintaining their passive income.
If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.
The demand for cushy white collar desk jobs (which weren't around 30 years ago) is crashing. Rest of the world, not so much.
30 years ago was the middle of the .com boom and white collar jobs had been around for a century already. White collar employment started with the industrial revolution and really took off during the post-WWII boom.
Cushy white collar desk jobs were not around in the mid 90s?
Nope, Most American workers were just auto plant workers and soybean farmers until the internet was invented in 1991.
Figure has been doing a 75 hour live stream of it actually replacing a real job and it has that AI magic where it has gestures and movements that seem emergent. They’re coming for anything manual in less than 2 years.