AI could force 11 million US workers into new careers by 2035 - CNN

McKinsey & Co. released research on Tuesday estimating that 11 million American workers — 6.5% of the current labour force — 'might have to jump into entirely different occupations' by 2035. Jump. As in, a jaunty little hop, presumably with a landing roll and a LinkedIn post at the end. The phrase 'might have to' is doing the work of a firm paid handsomely to describe a cliff as a launchpad, and 'entirely different occupations' is what you write when you cannot bring yourself to use the word 'scrapped'. The research comes courtesy of McKinsey & Co., whose own occupations are not, it is fair to say, in question.

The arithmetic is a masterclass in ledger-balancing. Automation could cut labour demand by 36 million jobs; growth in AI-related fields and the broader economy could generate demand for 40 million. Net plus four million! Everyone's fine! It is the consultancy equivalent of declaring the average temperature of the operating theatre perfectly comfortable while one patient is on fire and another is in the freezer. One of those numbers is a projection, the other arrives labelled a 'base estimate', and the 11 million stuck in the middle are people with mortgages and a Tuesday.

And 2035 is a lovely piece of scheduling: three elections away, comfortably past the point at which anyone currently making these decisions will be asked about them. It is the same move we flagged when employee confidence hit its record low — the anxiety lands now, the retraining lands later, the accountability lands never. Six and a half per cent of the workforce being politely invited to become something else is not a transition. It is a shrug with a slide deck, and McKinsey's slides are, to be fair, immaculate.