Jobs survive, pay and purpose don’t: The quiet risk of workplace AI
Resource Details
Author(s): Paul Glavin, Scott Schieman, Alexander Wilson
Date: July 18, 2025
If one of the leading voices in artificial intelligence is right, a storm could be brewing for white-collar workers. Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of AI startup Anthropic, recently predicted that within the next five years AI could wipe out up to 50 per cent of entry‑level white‑collar jobs – and push unemployment to 10‑20 per cent.
Skeptics dismiss this as Silicon Valley hype or the predictable boosterism of a CEO selling his technology.
History supports the skeptics. Previous job-killing innovations rarely met dire predictions. Economists often reassure us that technology complements workers rather than replacing them, boosting productivity.
When ATMs arrived in the 1970s, for example, banks redeployed tellers into customer service and financial advisory roles requiring more creativity and human judgment.
But AI’s advance may be different: it cuts across countless occupations and today’s AI models already draft emails, summarize documents, write code and generate reports – striking at the heart of white-collar work.
Our ongoing Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Survey (C-QWELS) reveal how these changes are registering with Canadian workers. From September 2023 to April 2025, the share who said machines or computers were “very” or “somewhat” likely to take over much of their current job rose from 17 to 23 per cent. Strikingly, this increase occurred almost entirely in the last six months – and was driven by university graduates, whose concern jumped nearly 10 percentage points over that period.
Skeptics dismiss this as Silicon Valley hype or the predictable boosterism of a CEO selling his technology.
History supports the skeptics. Previous job-killing innovations rarely met dire predictions. Economists often reassure us that technology complements workers rather than replacing them, boosting productivity.
When ATMs arrived in the 1970s, for example, banks redeployed tellers into customer service and financial advisory roles requiring more creativity and human judgment.
But AI’s advance may be different: it cuts across countless occupations and today’s AI models already draft emails, summarize documents, write code and generate reports – striking at the heart of white-collar work.
Our ongoing Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Survey (C-QWELS) reveal how these changes are registering with Canadian workers. From September 2023 to April 2025, the share who said machines or computers were “very” or “somewhat” likely to take over much of their current job rose from 17 to 23 per cent. Strikingly, this increase occurred almost entirely in the last six months – and was driven by university graduates, whose concern jumped nearly 10 percentage points over that period.