Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang warned that rapid advances in artificial intelligence could significantly disrupt entry-level white-collar employment, including jobs once considered among the safest career paths in the technology sector.
Speaking during a recent television appearance and in comments circulated widely on social media, Yang said conversations at a recent AI conference left him alarmed by the pace of technological change. Its implications for young workers entering the labor market. “I just came from an AI conference out West,” Yang said in the interview transcript. “They said to me that what we’re going to see in the next six months outstrips what we’ve seen in the last 10 years because the rate of change is on a hockey stick and heading up.”
Yang, an entrepreneur and founder of the Forward Party who built much of his national profile around concerns over automation and the future of work during his 2020 presidential campaign. He said even he was surprised by what he heard from companies developing AI tools. “I gotta say I’m pretty up to date on this stuff and it blew my mind on some of the stuff I was seeing,” he said. One example Yang cited involved a company developing autonomous coding systems for businesses. According to Yang, the firm’s revenue had increased “100-fold in the last 12 months,” signaling rising corporate demand for AI tools that can automate software development tasks traditionally handled by human engineers.
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“If that continues, it’s going to eat a lot of the tech budgets from major corporates that used to go to humans,” Yang said. “And so you’re seeing the employment of recent computer science graduates fall off a cliff from a lot of programs.” The remarks reflect growing debate in the United States over how generative AI technologies could reshape hiring across industries ranging from software engineering to finance, customer service, marketing, and legal research. Technology companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have accelerated investments in AI systems capable of producing code, text, images, and complex analysis.
Yang said the shift represents a dramatic reversal from career advice commonly given to students only a few years ago. “If you rewind four years ago, what would we tell young people for a secure career? Learn to code,” he said. “And now the opposite of that is true.” The issue could resonate strongly among Indian American and South Asian families in the United States, many of whom have traditionally encouraged careers in engineering, computer science, and other STEM fields viewed as pathways to economic stability and upward mobility.
Yang also referenced comments by Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, who has publicly warned about the potential impact of AI on office jobs.“Dario Amodei laid it out very clearly,” Yang said. “We’re going to automate away up to 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in the next several years. And I believe him.”
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Yang argued that hiring slowdowns among recent graduates may already reflect those concerns.“The easiest people to fire are the people you haven’t hired yet,” he said. He also pointed to what he described as worsening employment outcomes for college graduates, saying underemployment among graduates had climbed above 50% and that unemployment rates for degree holders were approaching or exceeding those of non-college workers.
Economists and labor experts remain divided on how quickly AI adoption will eliminate jobs versus create new categories of work. Some analysts argue the technology could improve productivity while generating demand for workers skilled in managing, supervising, and integrating AI systems. Still, Yang said the speed of change now confronting the workforce may require policymakers, educators, and businesses to rethink how Americans prepare for careers in an increasingly automated economy.