If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who earn a wage for a living, it can be hard to stay positive in the wake of recent headlines. Jack Dorsey’s Block just cut 4,000 roles citing AI, which came on the heels of Amazon’s rolling layoffs, which sent some 16,000 office workers packing. Oracle, meanwhile, just announced it’s culling at least 20,000 workers from its ranks.
In an interview with the Psychiatric Times, psychiatrist Andrew Brown argued that the economic distress associated with this kind of unemployment also carries clinical side effects. A psych professional primarily focusing on the mental health of the unemployed, Brown has previously warned about how AI-driven job loss fuels anxiety and self-doubt. Now, those warnings are becoming all too real.
“What we can expect to see” with the AI jobs onslaught, he suggests, “is an amplification” of the anxieties that typically come with a loss of income. This is obvious enough: without money to pay for rent, groceries, heat, healthcare, or any of the other necessities of life, people don’t exactly thrive. One of the hidden impacts of all this, Brown asserts, is a heightened risk of psychological illness.
“There’s an initial shock that comes with job loss,” but then, “when worklessness is prolonged, when it becomes a chronic, reality-based problem, you see a variety of other psychological-psychiatric illnesses and morbidities that arise,” Brown explains. Medically, he notes, this can occur even in individuals without a prior history of psychiatric distress.
Whether you buy the tales of AI-related job loss — which, to be fair, are likely a major oversimplification — the labor market outlook is looking pretty grim regardless.
“We won’t just have individuals who are suffering as a result of job loss once or twice,” Brown says. “We can expect serial job loss and chronic uncertainty, and therefore chronic anxiety about one’s future, one’s future in the workplace, one’s future capacity to sustain themselves economically.”
“It will no longer be possible for people to develop a coherent and sustainable personal narrative about their professional identity, because the ability to contribute to the workforce has become so unstable, so fragmented.”
As this goes on, he says, our individual sense of usefulness — based on the development of specialized skills over the course of a career — will also come under threat. Brown concludes: “what we’ll see with AI is that, not only will one have to develop a new skill set once or twice, but there will be this serial way in which skills are suddenly rendered useless.”
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