Ford CEO Predicts AI Could Eliminate Half of US White-Collar Jobs (msn.com) 93
Ford CEO Jim Farley believes half of all white-collar workers in the U.S. could lose their jobs to AI in the coming years, he said. He joins other executives making similar predictions about AI's impact on employment. "AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind," he said. From a report: The Ford CEO's comments are among the most pointed to date from a large-company U.S. executive outside of Silicon Valley. His remarks reflect an emerging shift in how many executives explain the potential human cost from the technology. Until now, few corporate leaders have wanted to publicly acknowledge the extent to which white-collar jobs could vanish.
In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses, noting that innovation historically creates a range of new roles.
In private, though, CEOs have spent months whispering about how their businesses could likely be run with a fraction of the current staff. Technologies including automation software, AI and robots are being rolled out to make operations as lean and efficient as possible.
In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses, noting that innovation historically creates a range of new roles.
In private, though, CEOs have spent months whispering about how their businesses could likely be run with a fraction of the current staff. Technologies including automation software, AI and robots are being rolled out to make operations as lean and efficient as possible.
go ______ yourself (Score:2)
Re:go ______ yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple computer (Score:3, Informative)
They don't care about having a lot of customers anymore. They want a tiny amount of ultra Rich customers paying a huge amount of money.
What we are heading for is techno feudalism. There's going to be a very very very very tiny number of kings and queens running the show, a very very small number of people serving them and then 99.9% of us will be living in unimaginable poverty..
Go look u
Re:Apple computer (Score:4)
Over half of US smart phone owners own an Apple so their customer base is hardly "tiny", at least in this country.
I also think you're giving modern business leaders too much credit in regards to long term planning. They only care about the next quarter or at best the next year. They could give a rats ass about future wide spread unemployment because they'll be both wealthy and retired by then.
Re:Apple computer (Score:4)
Apple computer is one of the most powerful and wealthy companies on the planet but has a tiny number of users.
Describe "tiny". According to worldwide estimates [canalys.com], 2024 computer shipments:
While 23 M is less than half of what Lenovo shipped last year, I would not call 23M units "tiny"
They don't care about having a lot of customers anymore. They want a tiny amount of ultra Rich customers paying a huge amount of money.
Describe "huge amount of money." The cheapest Mac mini is $599. The cheapest Mac laptop is $999. Yes other OEMs like Dell and Lenovo have cheaper options but it has been my experience when it comes OEM computers that cheaper means it will need to be replaced sooner. When friends and family ask advice on buying a sub $500 laptop, I advise them to look at laptops $500 or higher .
Re: Apple computer (Score:3)
I bought a $300 laptop almost two years ago, it still does all the things I want it to do, and quickly too. It's got a 2C4T AMD and I was able to upgrade the RAM to 8GB with a perfectly matching used module from eBay for $15. (IME they have to match exactly for modern integrated video to work reliably.) It's no game console, but video encode and decode work well.
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The cheapest Mac laptop is $999
High by almost a third, Apple’s cheapest laptop is a $650 model of the M1 MacBook Air sold only via Walmart.
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The cheapest Mac laptop is $999
High by almost a third, Apple’s cheapest laptop is a $650 model of the M1 MacBook Air sold only via Walmart.
You shouldn't buy that. Not only is it worse by almost every spec (cpu speed, graphics, memory, cameras, battery lifetime, external display support, wifi standard), but it will also have approximately 3-4 years less of updates from today. Per year, it will probably be more expensive than the cheapest M4 air.
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Right now I see that a lot of the IT world has stagnated and they are looking at AI as their golden goose, but even AI isn't going to cut it - all AI does is to cook up and combine already created solutions. Sometimes in new interesting ways, but interesting isn't necessarily useful.
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I think that either you don't understand AI, or you don't understand how creativity works in people. Probably both.
Current AIs don't have a good selection filter for their creativity. This is a real weakness, that I expect can only be remedied by real world experience. But they *are* creative in the same sense that people are. It's just that a lot of what they create is garbage (although *different* garbage than what most people create).
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Elimination will come by shooting themselves in the foot. A bunch of unemployed people won't be able to buy their cars.
His is an odd quote considering Henry Ford based his company on selling cars to the masses and having workers who could afford a Ford. If AI is truly that good, why does a company need a CEO? It'll react to real time data indicating changes in teh market and make decisions long before a CEO and board can, and hallucination assures many of those will be as head scratching a with a human CEO.
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Companies change. OTOH, perhaps those that continue to have jobs at Ford will continue to be able to buy a Ford.
should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is scared' (Score:2)
Re: should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is sca (Score:3)
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This is the productivity paradox. IT was supposed to usher in this great new world of productivity and it never manifested. This promise of the great new world where productivity soars is a sales pitch that only works on C level execs who need to justify their existence to the company before they parachute out. AI when it reaches AGI might do some useful things., for now it is a LLM that predicts the next word in a way we naively believe is thought.
Re: should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is sc (Score:2)
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That's just a minor side effect, what they actually used it for was to grow corporate profits continuously for half a century while keeping worker pay stagnant. If workers got any benefit from their own productivity improvements over that time, they'd be making 40% more money or working 2 less days per week on average now.
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It is not a paradox. Productivity has increased at least since 1945 and it even accelerated around 1995. But benefits are not distributed evenly.
https://i.sstatic.net/iCTuo.jp... [sstatic.net]
This productivity increase, or automation, has also caused a steady job loss (when measured as total hours or work), at least for the past 15 years. I am pretty sure that this means that even if new jobs are created, it won't be enough to cover lost jobs, unless we switch back to "man works, woman stays home" society.
You are also mi
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This is the productivity paradox. IT was supposed to usher in this great new world of productivity and it never manifested.
it depends. I think people forget what it was like in the old days without IT. For example, if you wanted a record before digitization:
"Hey I need this document."
"Here's a flashlight and some bug spray. All the files are in the basement."
"There are bugs in the basement?"
"No. The bug spray is for the rats. Mean little varmints"
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I guess you were born after 1990 or so. There was still a guy with a cart delivering inter-office memos when I did "take your kid to work day" at boeing in 1991 or so. Personal computers effectively eliminated the secretary by 1995 as executives learned to type messages themselves. Spreadsheets changed accounting and forecasting forever; "computer" used to be a job. "IT was supposed to usher in this great new world of productivity and it never manifested." What the heck are you talking about buddy? The offi
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Those who don't foul up history... (Score:2)
Or one person makes the mistakes of two. Don't forget the offshoring craze that generated piles of maintenance problems such that at least some staff was often re-onshored. Being embedded in the domain matters.
All the CEO's were gung-ho about offshoring back then also, but ended up with more ho than gung.
Re: Those who don't foul up history... (Score:2)
Re:should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is scar (Score:4, Informative)
To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work in the corporate world has been meeting summarization technology. Basically the AI attempts to interpret what was said in the meeting in order to deliver a summary.
I call it semi-useful because it doesn't understand nuance, varying slang terms versus official terms for industry-speak, and it can't even handle wisecracking.
I suppose that in a forensic-ish role it could help because it could analyze large datasets to find patterns, datasets that are so large that it's difficult for humans to evaluate all of the conditions, but whether or not this actually happens in a corporate role is hard to say. Most of the really huge data-processing AI systems are being overtly managed by developers. The biggest companies might be able to self-manage this, and other large companies not in this line of work might well sub-out this systems maintenance to technical services companies to maintain it on their behalf, but whether or not this trickles down to smaller companies would very much depend on how much it costs, and really how good the results actually are.
If I was middle-management I would be very cautious about embracing AI. The -GPT systems of the world have already demonstrated how utter crap they are sometimes, and my guess is that the sort of AI that will be available to them to potentially replace team members will be more like that and less like big-data AI. Those middle-managers will find their own roles diminished if AI comes in like this CEO thinks it will, and that not only threatens these middle-managers' positions through garbage-out, it also threatens to turn these middle-managers into the frontline white-collar workers again as they have fewer and fewer people to supervise and are now just keyboard-monkeys themselves.
For Ford and other manufacturing companies, I expect they will continue to push for savings in the manufacturing side of the house more than the administration, marketing, sales, and management sides of the house. I expect that they'll use it in the combination of design and manufacturing to attempt to produce product designs that require fewer and fewer people to be involved to actually manufacture said products. This is particularly an issue for automakers where their contracts for manufacturing labor might require them to pay workers when the plants are idle because the plants are being retooled for different design or because the company mispredicted sales forecasts and overbuilt and needs to idle until inventory is reduced. I could see them wanting to reduce the number of actual workers because then they don't have to contend with labor considerations for manufacturing tasks that don't involve humans. But that may not even be a matter of AI, that may just be more white-collar engineers working on how to design for the factory even more than they do today.
How much of this sort of announcement by corporate leadership could be attributed to misdirection? Threaten the positions of the office workers closest to them to distract while laying off the manufacturing workers at the far-flung plants?
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> To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work
I hope that you mean that it has been the only example you have personally seen, because there are dozens of examples.
"AlphaEvolve proposed a Verilog rewrite that removed unnecessary bits in a key, highly optimized arithmetic circuit for matrix multiplication. Crucially, the proposal must pass robust verification methods to confirm that the modified circuit maintains functional correctness. This proposal was integrated into an upcom
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And how many of those applications allow for a human being to be removed from the workforce?
Just from the summaries that you posted alone, it looks like it will take highly technical staff just to have the capability to review the AI returns to confirm if they're even workable or not.
Most of those also look like improvements that add essentially new capability rather than replacing human capability. They might even be adding to the number of people employed because in addition to the teams doing the primar
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> And how many of those applications allow for a human being to be removed from the workforce?
Oh, I did not try to argue with you. I just assumed, based on your first line that you were not aware of all the things that AI is being used in the corporate world. But bottom two links are cases where workers are being removed. And it is not like this was a full list of what AI has done, it was just a few examples. If you were not familiar with any of these, I can guarantee that you are not aware of hundreds o
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Most of those things are either experimental, or only useful in a highly structured environment.
AI is coming, but the current publicly available crop (outside specialty tasks) makes lots of mistakes. So it's only useful in places where those mistakes can be tolerated. Maybe 6 months from now. I rather trust Derek Lowe's analysis of where biochemical AI is currently...and his analysis is "it needs better data!".
One shouldn't blindly trust news stories. There are always slanted. Sometimes you can figure
Re:should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is scar (Score:4)
To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work in the corporate world has been meeting summarization technology. Basically the AI attempts to interpret what was said in the meeting in order to deliver a summary.
To me AI is still a work in progress. The best uses of AI is in discovering unknown patterns. However in some fields like science, results are checked. In other areas, I feel that validating results is lacking or non-existent. For example there have been a few lawyers that have been caught with using AI to generate filings. The filings themselves looked fine on the surface; however, AI fabricated the cases cited in the filings. It would be one thing to use AI write a brief or filing: Not checking the work is just lazy and stupid.
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Whether it's a "work in progress" or "useful tool" depends on which AI you're talking about, and what task you're considering. Many of them are performing tasks that used to require highly trained experts. Others are doing things where a high error rate is a reasonable tradeoff for a "cheap and fast turn-around". But it's definitely true that for lots of tasks even the best are, at best, a "work in progress. So don't use it for those jobs.
OTOH, figuring out which jobs it can or can't do is a "at this po
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To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work in the corporate world has been meeting summarization technology.
Lots of pattern recognition, from quality control to medical diagnosis. Granted that is mostly “machine learning” not large language models, so “so last decade”, but extremely effective.
Basically any problem domain where we can recognize a good solution (and it is unambiguously different from bad solutions), but don’t know any step by step process to get to one have had success stories. Him, no there is more to it then that, it seems like we have spent far far longer not ge
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Scared of what? There will still be a CEO, that's as secure a job as ever. Losing customers to unemployment? Are you paying attention to the push to reinvigorate manufacturing in the US? Those are just that car-buyers will fill, and not half will be replaced by AI or automation. Infrastructure jobs? Those will come with manufacturing and even AI, as that needs more energy.
Not scared. The modern CEO sees opportunity, to reshape their business, create new things, new markets, it's a huge change coming, and th
CEOs are salespeople (Score:5, Insightful)
Their job is to sell to investors that their company is doing just fine. They see layoffs coming, and would desperately like to blame AI, instead of blaming just about anything else.
Reality usually turns out to be not as bad as the doomsayers predict, and not as good as the cheerleaders predict. Some jobs will be lost, yes. But half of white collar jobs? That prediction assumes way more confidence in what AI can do, than is warranted in practice.. Despite how quickly AI has burst on the scene, it's still a very raw, immature product. It's going to take time for it to mature and to be able to really replace people's jobs at scale.
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Their job is to sell to investors that their company is doing just fine. They see layoffs coming, and would desperately like to blame AI, instead of blaming just about anything else.
Reality usually turns out to be not as bad as the doomsayers predict, and not as good as the cheerleaders predict. Some jobs will be lost, yes. But half of white collar jobs?
Perhaps he was more referring to his "white" collar workers, since the union negotiations essentially turned a blue collar hourly wage into something that every college graduate is now jealous of.
Of course the end result of that blue collar turned white is rolling mortgages rotting away on Ford lots everywhere. Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with that instant depreciation hit that went from 10% to 40% for all post-COVID overpriced dogshit?
Preach on, value-adding CEO. * rolls eyes *
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CEOs are salespeople
Yes, and sometimes they’re salespeople doing damage control—trying to stay ahead of a wave they can’t stop by pretending they’re the ones steering the boat.
They see layoffs coming, and would desperately like to blame AI, instead of blaming just about anything else.
Agreed. “AI did it” is the new “market forces.” It’s a convenient scapegoat—abstract enough to seem inevitable, opaque enough to deflect scrutiny.
Reality usually turns out to be not as bad as the doomsayers predict, and not as good as the cheerleaders predict.
Absolutely. That’s the safest sentence in tech—true in the way that saying “the sky is sometimes cloudy” is true.
Some jobs will be lost, yes. But half of white collar jobs? That prediction assumes way more confidence in what AI can do, than is warranted in practice.
Here’s
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We might not be as far apart as you suspect.
"Half" of white collar jobs may be lost, but not in the short time scale that is implied by the statement. We lost half of manufacturing jobs since 1970, it took 50 years. We lost 90% of farming jobs--in the last 100 years. Wide scale change takes time.
As we all have seen, 80% of the functionality is accomplished by the first 20% of the work, but that last 20% of functionality is a killer. AI isn't going to be different. It's done 20% of the work to get as far as
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We might not be as far apart as you suspect.
Agreed. I appreciate your tone here—seriously. You’re not wrong that AI is not (yet) a full replacement for every human role. But we’re approaching this from very different angles. You’re focused on when full replacement might happen. I’m pointing to the consequences of partial replacement that’s already underway.
"Half" of white collar jobs may be lost, but not in the short time scale that is implied by the statement. We lost half of manufacturing jobs since 1970, it took 50 years. We lost 90% of farming jobs--in the last 100 years. Wide scale change takes time.
You're absolutely right that large-scale change historically takes time. But in this case, I think you're looking at the wrong metric. Farming and manufacturing
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Whether the industry is farming, or driving taxis, or whatever, automation always takes the lowest-skilled jobs first. Farm mechanization replaced low-skilled crop pickers and people weeding with hoes. Self-driving cars have started to take Uber jobs. In each industry, automation is unable to take on the more challenging work. You could say that mechanization and automation "hollowed out" these industries too. Yet these industries still need human labor, and they figure out ways to train them. Software deve
What about the CEOs? (Score:2)
Some say AI could eliminate half of US CIO jobs.
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PhbGPT
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oops .. CEO jobs
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Anthropic's recent test of having a AI run a small business suggests that CEOs are safe this year.
Speaking of Ford ... (Score:4, Funny)
https://babylonbee.com/news/fo... [babylonbee.com]
It will destroy Blue collar jobs too (Score:2)
Never mind the fact that we can't all be plumbers. If we all go be blue collar people again, who the hell is going to hire all those blue color people? I don't know if anyone here ever knew any blue collar folk but they don't hire other blue color folk to do anything except major jobs that require specialized tools and equipment.
Not that any of this matters. We are about to give another 5
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Hire and Higher are homophones but mean different things. You hire someone to do the job and hope they don't move higher up the corporate ladder than you.
--your friendly neighborhood pedant.
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--your friendly neighborhood pedant.
This is just an ad homonym argument.
[stolen from a recent SMBC]
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You're not wrong. But..
Homonym not homenim. Yes it's intentionally confusing. That's the joke.
It's just a silly language joke that's all.
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"This is just an ad homonym argument."
Perfect. Made my day.
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Ironically that error was probably done by autocorrect, the previous version of AI.
I don't think the intent of autocorrect was to encourage careful proof reading, but that is what it is achieving.
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Not that any of this matters. We are about to give another 5 trillion dollars to the 1% and the economy is going to collapse when we do.
No one seems to be talking about how bought and paid for your local repesentative is. Murkowski and Collins are the two biggest jokes in politics. They stand for nothing. They stand with their hands out and that is how they vote. They have this performative theater act they do to make it seem like they support their constitutents, when they do nothing but take bribes.
I disagree with the economy will collapse because of this awful bill. A mixture of trump's tariffs and the fed being his personal fluffer wil
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I am no longer coming to this site. Every day is a stupid article about "AI is taking all the jobs!". No its not. This site doesnt have any original content. Its just posting the same crap day after day after day about ai. Ive had enough.
Instead of ignoring all of the reports of sizeable layoffs that have plagued tech for the last 12-18 months (ironically for the reason you deny), care to share what job you hold that you assume is magically immune in the alternate reality unfazed by AI?
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Re: I am no longer coming to this site (Score:2)
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You know what I do when an article is posted on slashdot I dont like??? I ignore it
I can tell you're an american. Gullible, naive and verrrrry stupid.
You saw the paneless van full of candy and said outloud, "I IGNORE IT". Seconds later, you jump in and say it's ok.
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This site doesnt have any original content.
Slashdot has always been a news aggregator with a comments section. There has never been a significant amount of original content.
New jobs? (Score:3)
Back in the seventies and eighties, as automation was hitting hard, and offshoring beginning, the talk was all about how everyone would get newer, better jobs in the "information economy".
They at least could point to something.
Now? They have *nothing* at all, and "we'll have fewer people, but other companies will pick up the slack" ... said by every one of them.
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Back in the seventies and eighties, as automation was hitting hard, and offshoring beginning, the talk was all about how everyone would get newer, better jobs in the "information economy". They at least could point to something.
Now? They have *nothing* at all, and "we'll have fewer people, but other companies will pick up the slack" ... said by every one of them.
In the interim, companies and C-suite executives have realized that they no longer have to have any rhetoric at all that reassures workers or the general public. In fact, our media being owned by a very small number of extremely wealthy corporations actually makes it important to most executives to only appeal to the extremely wealthy, the owner class, and the government officials that work directly for that owner class. So for the most part, these folks have stepped into a reality where they no longer have
But but but (Score:2)
"Ford CEO Predicts AI Could Eliminate Half of US White-Collar Jobs"
But not HIS job, amirite?
So Ecoboost was in reality already A.I. .. (Score:2)
.. interesting Ford is at the technological forefront, they will drive the blue as well as the white collars with all the ripped wet belts .. because they ain't drivin a camshaft any more.
They will also reinvent themself, when they stop selling cars ..
Look at motivations (Score:5, Insightful)
When reading statements or listening to interviews, always keep the speaker's motivations in mind. What would the CEO of Ford be trying to accomplish by what they're saying? The typical motivations are to reassure investors. How does saying that half the white collar jobs are going to be gone in the coming years reassure investors? It says, "this new technology is going to allow Ford to cut half of a very large expense."
Is it realistic? No. But it supports his goal: you should invest in Ford because we can already see how to use this new technology to drastically decrease costs.
Another goal he has is to keep workers fearing for their jobs. This is an implied threat to a bunch of Ford workers... you're lucky to have a job, so keep your head down and don't make a fuss. Cuts are coming.
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That's exactly it, from a highly visible corporation.
CEOs are fearful for their jobs if they don't demonstrate progress towards adopting AI and keeping up with the times. We will be seeing a lot of "AI driven efficiency" signaling from executives to keep investors and the board happy.
It is interesting to observe how the narrative for the same process is different in the US and Europe.
In Europe, the talk is all about how AI is going to make workers more productive and relieve them from tedious work, but not
post labor economics (Score:2)
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Post labor and post growth given the demographics.
Forgive me ... (Score:2)
Never mind AI ... (Score:1)
Too bad for white collar workers (Score:2)
Sigh... probably not wrong. (Score:2)
It'll be a while - probably a long while - before AI can replace those core people who are vital to an org. You know the type... driven, transformative... annoying.... and valuable.
But... most people are not that. Can AI replace "most" people? Probably. That bucket contains roles that are mundane and repetitive, and that's relatively easy, it also contains the seat fillers and half-assers. And there thd AI doesn't even have to be particularly good to be equivalent.
People sometimes miss that the real questio
How bad are Ford's white collar workers... (Score:2)
if he thinks they can be replaced by a random bullshit generator?
These CEOs don't understand basic economics (Score:2)
The drive to the bottom line (see what I did there?) is a slippery slope. A good CEO will balance profitability with employee satisfaction. Why? Because a company's employees should be their best customers. If you have "half" as many customers right out of the gate, the company is going to do worse as a result. People who talk about AI eliminating jobs forget that their business model relies on a base of customers willing to spend their money on the product. If people are out of work, they aren't going to b
For the umpteenth time... (Score:2)
... half of all white-collar workers in the U.S. could lose their jobs to AI in the coming years
Have these folks not realized that all of the employees who are poised to lose their jobs, are also then poised to become non-consumers? Who in hell is going to buy all the products and services which AI supposedly makes so much cheaper, when the vast majority of the population is working multiple jobs just to stay housed and fed? Never mind medical care...
But wait - it's worse than that. Because where are those "multiple jobs" I just mentioned going to come from? Even fast-food joints and cheap hotels nee
Business case (Score:2)
Perhaps the CEO's might ask themselves "Who is going to buy our product?" People with no money don't buy very much. Ands is the .1 percent going to buy hundreds of thousands of your product?
LLMs: Your white-collar job is now blue collar. (Score:2)
There’s been a lot of noise about CEOs blaming AI for upcoming layoffs. And sure, some of that is classic damage control—“We didn’t want to fire you, the algorithm made us do it.” But there’s a deeper shift happening, and we’re not talking about it clearly enough. What Ford's CEO is saying is important, and needs to be heard.
What AI is doing to white-collar labor today is an exact parallel to what automation did to blue-collar labor a few generations ago. Back then
He is drinking the Kool aid (Score:2)
Of all the other CEOs, there still isn't a way to directly replace workers. And Llms aren't AGI and AGI could be a multi decade process if ever. Yeah they have some cool stuff to do a lot of jobs, but it's not going to get rid of 50%. I think I in a few years people will start to realize that they can't replace as many jobs as they thought they could
Crappy CEO predicts crappy things (Score:2)
In actual reality, this cretin probably only wants to pump the value of his stock options.
Already happened in government (Score:2)
CEOs and executives first (Score:2)
AI could eliminate every CEO (Score:3)
Expect more deportations (Score:2)
so that there'll be jobs for the white white-collar men who get replaced by AI
If AI eleiminates half... (Score:2)