Is the end nigh for white collar workers?

It’s almost amusing (if it weren’t so tragic) how each new wave of AI panic gets dressed up as breaking news. “AI could kill millions of jobs,” the experts say, as if this were a revelation. What we’re really witnessing isn’t just job loss. We’re seeing the collapse of the entire logic underpinning 20th-century education and work.

Here’s the latest headline: Behind the curtain: A white-collar bloodbath

It’s a well-reasoned article written by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Axios, but let’s be clear: The problem isn’t AI taking away jobs. The real crisis is that we’ve built entire systems (schools, universities, corporations…) that treat humans as compliant cogs, easily replaced by algorithms. When you design work and learning around compliance, you invite automation. If your value-add is following instructions, you’re already obsolete.

For more than a decade, I’ve argued that the “knowmad” future, where value is created by context, creativity, adaptability, and collaborative intelligence, isn’t science fiction. It’s our only viable path forward. The tragedy is that our institutions are still obsessed with producing “ready workers,” modeled after industrial- and information-era work, instead of attending to the development of “ready humans,” ready to lead in whatever future is thrown at us.

Now the entire world is thrust forward into this science fiction future. Anthropic’s CEO warns of 10-20% unemployment, as if that’s the headline. Here’s the real story: The only “jobs” safe from AI are those we haven’t even imagined yet: roles that demand human imagination, social meaning-making, and the ability to solve problems that don’t have answers in the back of the book. But we keep training people for jobs that machines already do better.

What’s needed is a radical rethink of what it means to be human in a world of smart machines. Simple reskilling won’t work. We need systems that empower people to invent new roles, shape new narratives, and create new forms of value that go well beyond employment as we know it.

So yes, AI will kill millions of jobs. But if that’s all we’re worried about, we’ve already missed the bigger question: What are we actually preparing people for? If the answer is “the old world of work,” then we’re complicit in the very obsolescence we fear.

It’s time to stop tinkering with long obsolete, broken models and start building futures that actually deserve humans.