--- title: "If AI Causes an Office Job Wipeout, It’ll Cause Huge Problems for Blue Collar Work Too" description: "All those white collar jobs that will supposedly be eliminated by AI won't be wiped out in a vacuum, an expert warns." date: "2026-02-25" modified: "2026-02-25" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-blue-collar-jobs-wipeout" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Ethics" --- # If AI Causes an Office Job Wipeout, It’ll Cause Huge Problems for Blue Collar Work Too ![A series of translucent, folded paper-like panels each displaying a blurred image of a construction worker wearing a yellow hard hat, orange safety vest, white shirt, blue pants, black gloves, and brown boots. The panels are arranged in a row against a bright orange background with a large yellow circle behind the first two panels. The images on the panels appear to be reflections or shadows of the construction worker in different poses.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images* Blue collar workers may be [enjoying a certain degree of schadenfreude]() at seeing the panic over tech, finance, and other white collar workers potentially losing their jobs to AI. But mass job destruction would end up being bad for virtually everyone who actually has to work for a living, not just overpaid office drones. That's according to one of the authors of a new report from Citrini Research that recently sent quivers of fear through the stock market for imagining a mass unemployment scenario caused by AI. "Let's say in our scenario, we talk about five percent of folks might get fired in a couple of years," coauthor Alap Shah, CEO of Littlebird.ai, said on the podcast, [as quoted by *Business Insider*](). "Those five percent, if there aren't white collar jobs for them to relocate into, then they're going to have to move into the gig economy and the blue collar labor force." "And so that puts pressure on the entire labor market, not just the white collar one," Shah added. The Citrini report, published Sunday, imagines a hypothetical 2028 in which productivity advances enabled by powerful AI models outmode vast portions of the job market. That's all fine with Wall Street, since the part that really had investors spooked was the paper's prediction that this would also dry up consumer spending, cause a global stock sell-off, and collapse even dependable money-makers like the S&P 500. Shares in the Nasdaq Composite index fell by more than one percent on Monday, [*Bloomberg* reported](), as the gloomy paper went viral in investor and AI circles. The paper's certainly in tune with what plenty of figures in the AI industry have been warning about. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has consistently cautioned that the tech is poised to destroy entire categories of work. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has proclaimed that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs. More recently, Microsoft's AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman [predicted]() that virtually all office tasks will be automated within 18 months. As real as the threat of jobs destruction may be, however, the Citrini paper has been criticized by economists for being a little far-fetched. "I would take it seriously, not literally," Nick Ferres, CIO at Vantage Point Asset Management, [told *Reuters*](). Krishan Guha at Evercore ISI said the paper relied on "extreme and improbable conditions" and argued that blue collar workers would actually stand to gain somewhat from the white collar layoffs. "Although some of these workers would suffer from the drop in the demand from white collar workers, and/or from competition from newly displaced white collar, others with discrete skills would in effect be complements to AI, and their activities would be in greater demand as collapsing cost of AI-led tasks increased the desired volume of consumption of these products," Guha wrote in an note, [as quoted by the *Financial Times*](). "Because their productivity would not rise anything like as rapidly as AI-led productivity in cognitive tasks, these blue collar workers would see large relative wage gains. And they certainly would consume." To some extent, AI-related layoffs are very likely already happening, with [one report]() finding that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Yet these could end up being examples of "AI washing" — job cuts motivated for purely financial reasons, and not because of the tech's actual capabilities. AI, in other words, may simply provide a convenient excuse. **More on AI:** [*American AI Industry Trembles as Deepseek Prepares to Release New Model*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()