AI job anxiety: It's real, and coming at the worst time
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Workers at all stages of their careers — from job hunters to job havers — are increasingly anxious about the lightning-fast deployment of AI.
Why it matters: Their fears come at a particularly fraught moment, with jobs in scarce supply, hiring frozen in many industries and corporate leaders relentlessly pushing this technology as a replacement for humans.
Driving the news: AI is looming on the psychological horizon just as the U.S. labor market weakens — though right now AI's role in that market remains a big unknown.
- As of July, the number of unemployed people surpassed the number of job openings for the first time in four years.
- And in August, hiring stalled out — with the economy adding a scant 22,000 jobs, according to the latest jobs report.
Zoom in: Even AI-smitten executives agree it's important to keep humans in the loop. But they continue to be cagey about which humans, how many of them and for how long we'll need them.
- "I need less heads," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Logan Bartlett's podcast last month, describing how he'd reduced his customer service agent headcount "from 9,000 heads to about 5,000."
- But in July, Benioff told Axios' Ina Fried that the company plans to add thousands of sales staff, even as it relies more on AI.
"AI anxiety is real," behavioral scientist Lily Jampol told Axios. "A lot of it is tied up in uncertainty, because things are moving so quickly."
- Workers also say they're worried that their organizations will implement AI irresponsibly.
- And, Jampol adds, they feel a sense of powerlessness when they're not the ones making the decisions in their organizations about AI.
- "AI won't eliminate jobs, leaders will," she wrote in an email to Axios.
"There's an existential sort of unease," Geoff Mosher, a product developer who spent years in the tech industry, most recently at Verizon, told Axios about the feelings swirling in his network.
Zoom out: Bigger psychological forces are at play as well. "We already struggle with our worth as people and as a society," says Jada Butler, a therapist and health and wellness coach.
- The idea that a machine has more value than humans creates self-criticism, self-doubt and worsening anxieties, and leaves some people questioning their own value.
Between the lines: The anxiety manifests in the share of workers who say they're using AI in secret or overstating their skills.
Yes, but: AI-related job anxiety isn't all bad, mental health experts told Axios. It can push workers to learn new skills or explore other roles.
- The negative effects of AI job anxiety surface when people tie their self-worth to their work, says David Burns, psychiatry professor at Stanford and creator of the Feeling Great app.
- He calls this "achievement addiction," which he says is rooted in a mistaken belief that "you are what you do."
What we're watching: As the tools get better, the question isn't whether AI will reshape work, but whether workers have any say in what comes next.
