It’s been a tough year for tech workers as the industry has been hit a record number of layoffs. Nearly 120,000 tech workers have been let go this year as companies slim down their staffs in the name of AI productivity. As consensus grows in Silicon Valley and Wall Street about an incoming artificial intelligence “job apocalypse,” there are few answers on what comes next.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have recently tempered their previous apocalyptic predictions for the future of white-collar work, but Wall Street and their fellow Silicon Valley CEOs are holding fast to their predictions that AI will reshape how people work forever.
Regardless of which predictions are correct in the long term, AI layoffs are creating looming economic uncertainty for newly unemployed workers in a volatile job market. Many could turn to unemployment insurance benefits designed to tide workers over while they find new work, and Amodei has repeatedly called on the government to prepare for high unemployment.
But in 2022, nearly 75% of unemployed people didn’t even apply, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Experts who spoke to Fortune say that number is still accurate today.
Over the past year, new unemployment insurance claims have held at a relatively stable range of 200,000 and 250,000 claims per week, even as the unemployment rate has held steady at 4.3% the past three months, signaling that many workers are not taking advantage of a key safety-net...
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