In Greenville, South Carolina, photographer Celina Odeh, also 30, feels it too. As a digital tech on commercial shoots, her work has become a parlor game of elimination: Which skills will AI kill off next? She’s taken up knitting to stay sane.
It’s made work itself into an uncertainty, with dark impacts on our behavior, careers, and health of mind and body. A massive 71 percent of Americans are now scared that AI will steal livelihoods. Tech leaders issue Magic 8 Ball musings: white-collar jobs gone in months; half of entry-level jobs wiped out in five years; or, depending on who’s talking, jobs will simply “transform.” But how? When? What, if anything, is the plan?
That can hurt even more than jobs. One researcher in business psychology we spoke to framed job insecurity as a diffuse condition that makes us feel less in control, which is ultimately paralyzing. A growing body of research concurs, linking chronic workplace uncertainty to anxiety, depression, burnout, and even physical symptoms. A new report on AI-driven insecurity establishes a novel work hazard: “AI replacement dysfunction.”
Labor sociologist Victor Chen of Virginia Commonwealth University says that part of why the current automation wave is so unnerving is that there’s no clear answer for what workers should do. “There’s no obvious solution like ‘Get a college degree’ or ‘Get a STEM degree,’” Chen says. “That makes it difficult to plan your career, much less your life and your children’s futures.”
Ria Julien, a literary agent and lawyer representing everyone from blue-collar workers to tech employees, sees the same mood everywhere. “It’s an absolute climate of fear,” she says, one driven by a growing sense that the middle-class script is fraying. When some of her more well-off clients’ earnings drop to zero, and the idea that they’ll find new work is far from guaranteed, “it is absolutely devastating.”
Some economists are optimistic about automation, averring that AI could boost wages and job quality. (We find them cheery to the point of delusional.) But many others are profoundly skeptical. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz observes to us that “a lot depends on how we manage this technological transition,” and he worries that history offers us little reassurance. “Looking back, we didn’t manage industrialization well, and we don’t appear to be managing this well, either,” he warns.
Thomas Ferguson, research director at the Institute of New Economic Thinking, is blunt about the power imbalance: “The problem is that workers don’t run American companies: Business does. Conventional economic academic accounts don’t recognize this enough.”
Take Claire, 34, a data scientist in New York City, watching her role at a security camera start-up blur as AI agents take over most of her coding work. “Even three months ago, I was doing a completely different job,” she says. “Now I’m not even sure what to call myself. AI engineer? Manager of AI agents? I don’t know.” Overseeing multiple agents has created what some are calling “AI brain fry”—a mental overload from multitasking and AI babysitting. In handing off the work, Claire senses some essential part of herself slipping away. “I miss the flow of coding, the creative problem-solving, the thrill of wrestling with abstract ideas,” she admits quietly. “I’m afraid of losing my dreams to AI.”
What economists call information asymmetry only amplifies the unease. Ferguson says it’s one thing to know that what we call the “robot gaze” (which monitors worker data to maximize profits) exists. But it’s another to have no clue what’s being tracked and whether it might be used against you. “And you might want to learn AI on your own computer,” he advises. “Lest you teach your employer how to eliminate you.”
People understand that their work—and their worth—is being dictated by AI, and they’re losing the parameters in which to succeed. Sociologist Janet Vertesi, who studies AI and robotics at Princeton, puts it like this: “We are effacing expertise instead of enabling expertise.” Giorgio Ascoli, a neuroscientist at George Mason University, says that in his field, the formative years of learning by doing are disappearing, and without that, “you’re cutting your own roots,” leaving a workforce that never gains the experience needed for the part of the scientific method that demands human capability.
Diana Enriquez, a sociologist who studies large-scale automation, warns of companies following a “tech playbook” pressuring workers to trust technology, even when the algorithm is, well, wrong. Middle managers are forced to claim successes the system hasn’t actually delivered. Why? Because the C-suite mindset in tech companies, says Enriquez, holds that “workers are a problem that needs to be solved.”
Natasha Lennard, author of a forthcoming book on the philosophy of uncertainty, warns that we can’t let large language models put humans in a subordinate seat. “We’re told, ‘You don’t understand this; it’s beyond what you can imagine.’ Or, ‘AI will doom us all; AI will save us all,’” says Lennard. The real danger, she points out, is what she thinks of as “AI determinism”—unquestioned assumptions about how technology will develop.
Collective action offers a way out of the fog. Hamilton points to a 2022 Gallup poll showing union approval at its highest level since 1965. It’s true that white-collar workers remain far less unionized in the United States than their blue-collar counterparts, but with apocalyptic uncertainty knocking on their doors, they might want to join the club.
It wouldn’t be the first time. In the New Deal era, shared economic shock pushed white- and blue-collar workers into a broader labor coalition. It was imperfect and incomplete, but it showed that collective angst can bloom into collective power.
One thing we can be certain about: Human relatedness, expertise, insight, and imagination can’t be substituted. Protecting them will require smart policies, retraining programs, and worker participation.
If the middle class is going to thrive or even persist, our government has to step up to set rules, enforce protections, and put in place bottom-up AI policies that reflect human needs, making sure that the benefits of AI don’t just go to corporate boards. And if the federal government drags its feet, then states have to take action. Many are already doing just that, despite the murky political climate.
We don’t have to stand back and let AI write the script for the middle class. We still get to choose. For now.
This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.Hence then, the article about for white collar workers ai also stands for apocalyptic insecurity was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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