Ford CEO Jim Farley warns AI will cut U.S. white-collar jobs in half
Ford CEO Jim Farley slammed the current U.S. education system and predicted AI will slash half of white-collar jobs during last week’s Aspen Ideas Festival.
Farley stressed the value of the “essential economy” — workers who build, move, and fix things — and blasted the neglect of vocational training designed for 1950, not 2050. Ford has been investing in training to close the massive trade worker shortage, with deficits estimated at 600,000 for manufacturing and nearly 500,000 for construction. 
Farley highlighted growing demand for skilled trades, especially as AI demands more people to build and maintain its infrastructure. He said college-centric hiring is dropping fast and called out AI’s threat to office jobs.
“There’s more than one way to the American dream, but our whole education system is focused on four-year [college] education,” Farley said.
“Hiring an entry worker at a tech company has fallen 50% since 2019. Is that really where we want all of our kids to go? Artificial intelligence is gonna replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
This warning follows Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s May memo saying AI will cut the company’s corporate workforce in the coming years. Jassy wrote:
“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also told Axios AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive unemployment up to 20% within five years.
Job reports show the current unemployment rate sits at 4.1% as of June.
LinkedIn’s chief economic officer, Aneesh Raman, noted in May that AI is already replacing junior coding, legal, and retail tasks that once served as stepping stones for young workers.
Farley ended with a call for a new mindset to boost America’s essential economy and its future:
“We all sense that America can do better than we are doing,” Farley said last week.
“We need a new mindset, one that recognizes the success the importance of this essential economy and the importance to our vibrancy and sustainability as a country.”
Original story via Fortune.com
