Billionaire tech moguls aren't the only ones doomsaying about artificial intelligence layoffs. CEOs across a range of industries are now jumping on the bandwagon, saying it's no longer a matter of "if," but "how many" jobs AI will take.

A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal explored just how pervasive the automation idea is throughout a number of industries, and execs aren't pulling any punches.

For example, CEO of Ford Motor Company Jim Farley recently predicted that AI "is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US." He added that "AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind."

In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spooked his employees with a memo saying to expect layoffs in the next few years because of the "once-in-a-lifetime" revolution of AI.

And at JPMorgan Chase, CEO Marianne Lake recently told investors to expect the company's overall head count — and therefore its payroll expenses — to fall by as much as 10 percent over the next few years, thanks to the magic of AI.

If the AI automation dystopia really is upon us, it evidently slipped under the radar of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which recently released its latest jobs report. Among other things, it found that the US added 147,000 jobs in June, slightly dropping the unemployment rate from 4.2 percent to 4.1 — and seemingly refuting the claim of an impending AI takeover, at least for now.

Over half of these jobs, NBC notes, were in state and local government roles, while healthcare, social, service, and construction work made up the bulk of other gains.

Still, there are some major issues buried in the data, like the fact that long-term unemployment — people unemployed for six months or more — has skyrocketed from 190,000 to a whopping 1.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of people unemployed at the median length of unemployment, 15 weeks or more, jumped from 34.9 percent to 38.3 percent. That level hasn't been seen since the throes of the pandemic, NBC notes.

While those numbers are bad news — like, really bad — the crisis they point to is a little more complicated than an AI-powered dystopia. At their core, these numbers are arguably the result of our economy's dependence on unemployment laundered through AI hype.

As economic researchers Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith observed in a recent column, revenue from large language model (LLM) adoption is falling far short of the tech industry's promises. What gets presented as proof of AI's automation potential is instead a mash of penny-pinching layoffs, outsourcing, labor market saturation, and in some cases, employer bias against recent college grads.

With that view in mind, all the CEO bluster looks less like an imminent crisis brought on by AI, and more like business as usual in a market economy. What workers do about that whole situation is another story altogether.

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