For decades, economic insecurity was concentrated among blue-collar workers in manufacturing, logistics, and the retail sector. These were the people displaced first by offshoring, then by automation, and more recently by the gig economy and so-called platform economics.
The professional and managerial classes, by contrast, were told they were the winners of the system. They were sold the promise that digital skills, higher education, and corporate employment would insulate them from the volatility of the market. The myth was that the middle classes were immune to the challenges posed by the modern economy. That story is now unravelling.
… this is not a temporary correction. It is structural. AI is now being used to justify the redundancy of knowledge workers in exactly the way globalisation was once used to justify the redundancy of factory workers. Shopify's CEO has, for example, told staff they must prove why AI cannot do their work before requesting new resources. This is not innovation for the public good. It is cost-cutting dressed up as progress. When Microsoft, Intel, and BT are sacking staff while their profits rise, the logic is not technological advancement but shareholder extraction.
So what does this tell us? Very obviously, the implication is that the neoliberal model of growth through corporate concentration, financial engineering, and technological displacement has reached its limits. AI is not creating new markets or opportunities for human development. It is, instead, being deployed as a weapon of labour suppression. The supposed white-collar elite is discovering what blue-collar workers learned long ago, which is that under this form of capitalism, everyone is expendable.