So far, the narrative of AI in the workplace has had a consistent victim: the recent college grad, supposedly first on the chopping block as large language models automate the types of low level tasks that traditionally provided an on-ramp to office careers.
New evidence, however, suggests the tech may be impacting a surprisingly different segment of the workforce: those closest to retirement.
In a recent study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, economics professor Geoffrey Sanzenbacher took a hard look at labor data in order to map AI’s impact on older workers in the United States. Comparing government job data against an AI-exposure index — a data set that tracks the degree to which certain occupations hinge on tasks that AI can do — Sanzenbacher compared the number of workers 55 and older leaving the workforce before and after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Though the researcher caveats that the “impact of AI on any workers, let alone those near retirement, remains an open question,” his findings point to an alarming shift. Prior to ChatGPT, older workers in the most AI-exposed jobs — highly-trained knowledge worker gigs like coding and tax preparation — were more likely to work later into their lives compared to those in manual labor.
