The artificial intelligence revolution could lead to wealth inequalityaccording to Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock. That’s why Fink recommends that global economic and political leaders be proactive in figuring out how to ensure that workers are not excluded from the financial growth that AI is likely to create.
“If AI is doing to white-collar work what globalization has done to blue-collar work, we must confront it head-on. Not with abstractions about ‘jobs of tomorrow,’ but with a credible plan for broad participation in the gains.” Fink said on January 20 in his keynote speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Fink was referring to some experts connecting the increase in international trade and the outsourcing of labor by American companies overseas in the second half of the 20th century, leading to a decrease in blue-collar jobs and lower wages for American workers, even as businesses benefited.
Today, the rise of generative AI technologies could have a similar effect on white-collar workers, Fink says, at a time when several notable CEOs in all sectors – from Andy Jassy from Amazon has Ford’s Jim Farley – have touted plans to slow hiring or reduce headcount while handing the work over to AI tools.
The comparison with past technological disruptions is apt, says economist Lawrence DW Schmidt, associate professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies the effects of AI on the labor market. From the digital age to the logistics and communications technologies that have contributed to globalization, past technological disruptions have typically created “both winners and losers” in the workplace, Schmidt says.
“It devalues existing expertise while simultaneously creating many new opportunities. It’s in this sense that AI may not be so distinct from past technologies,” he says.
Technology could have an outsized effect on knowledge workers by automating the repetitive, data-intensive cognitive tasks that typically define white-collar roles. Even within the AI industry, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that “AI could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs in the next 1-5 years, even as it accelerates economic growth and scientific progress.” wrote in an essay posted on his personal website Monday.
AI can be a “powerful ally” for workers
AI has yet to address workers’ worst fears, even as more companies deploy new technologies, Schmidt notes. Since OpenAI made ChatGPT public in November 2022, AI has not seen “noticeable disruption” across the job market, according to a study from the Budget Lab at Yale University, published in October.
Some AI industry leaders, including Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidiainsisted that any possible disruption caused by the increased use of AI in the workplace will be offset by additional jobs created due to the subsequent increase in productivity and overall economic growth.
“You’re not going to lose your job because of an AI, but you’re going to lose your job because of someone using AI,” Huang said at the Milken Institute Global Conference in May 2025.
Companies that effectively deploy AI are likely to become more productive, and thus increase both revenue and headcount, Schmidt says. This growth “is kind of a rising tide that lifts all the boat-type phenomena,” he says, adding that AI “(creates) huge opportunities for swaths of new work that didn’t exist before.”
His advice: Find ways for AI to make you more productive and reallocate the rest of your time “toward things that AI is not good at.” This could include the kind of soft skills that AI is not as capable of replacingsuch as communication, creativity and critical thinking.
For Schmidt, this type of adaptation is the key to avoiding Fink’s warning. And as Fink pointed out, businesses and government leaders need to help, too, Schmidt believes. Employers in particular should “assure existing workers that their jobs are safe if they cooperate and help them think about how to use AI” to make their companies more efficient and productive, he says.
“The more we can focus our energy on leveraging the benefits (of AI) – ensuring that those who would be displaced by AI are instead those learning to work with AI and do their jobs in a different way – the brighter the future of work looks,” Schmidt says.
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