A top Goldman Sachs economist says AI will displace the jobs of 15 million US workers - Business Insider

Ah, Joseph Briggs of Goldman Sachs has looked into his crystal ball and seen 15 million Americans being politely shown the door by our new AI overlords. That's 9% of the workforce—a number so neat and round it practically screams 'we made this up on a spreadsheet while sipping a third coffee.' Briggs helpfully compares this to the tech upheaval of the late 1990s, which is like saying a gunshot wound is similar to a scraped knee because both involve bleeding. Back then, the internet created new jobs alongside the destruction; this time, the robots are coming for the spreadsheet itself, so where exactly do the displaced go? Salesforce? Meta? Oh, they're laying people off too. Brilliant.

The Goldman economist's prediction is notably precise: 15 million. Not 14.7, not 15.3—a lovely, reassuring integer. You can almost hear the PowerPoint slide being polished. 'Displaced' is the key word, of course, because nobody gets 'fired' anymore—they get 'displaced,' as if they were refugees from a natural disaster that happens to be a quarterly earnings call. Briggs himself is the bank's go-to AI job guru, which means his job is literally to predict when his own profession might become obsolete. Talk about writing your own exit interview.

So here we are: one of the world's most respected financial institutions calmly projecting that the equivalent of the entire population of New York City will need to find something else to do, all because we taught machines to write emails faster than we can. But don't worry—Goldman will no doubt have a proprietary ETF for that. The late 1990s comparison is especially rich: back then the danger was overvalued dot-com stocks; now it's overvalued humans. Progress!