Who is more likely to be replaced sooner? White collar vs Blue collar workers
2 significant things are circulating on the internet simultaneously this week:
A tweet about how a human beat a machine (a 10-hour livestream in which a human sorted packages and compared it to the productivity of a robot).
Or an announcement of a Microsoft AI chief that predicts AI will automate most white-collar work within 18 months.
While I don't think there will be a complete replacement of humans in either case, I do think we will see mass layoffs. My guess is that it will be white-collar jobs first.
The question is, if one option wins, how do we ensure the energy efficiency of these AI/robotic solutions and how do we ensure that it is cheaper than humans?
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My gut feeling is white-collar - people can survive without all the fancy hi-tech and other stuff that is not mandatory for a decent life. A computer won't help you to get some literal food or clothes :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@sk_uxpin I should rethink my shift to physical positions then :D
@busmark_w_nika hahaha, I'm not particularly excited about that (I am an absolute dummy when it comes to any kind of work at home), but yeah, I probably need to rethink this as well :D
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@sk_uxpin We can shake with hands there :D
@busmark_w_nika hands shaken :D
TinyCommand
I think the important distinction is that automation does not need to fully replace humans to still massively reduce headcount.
A company does not need an AI to be “better than a human.” It just needs the AI to make one employee handle the work of three.
That’s why white-collar jobs probably get affected first. Software scales much faster than robotics, and the infrastructure already exists.
The bigger question is exactly what you mentioned:
Can these systems become cheaper than humans once you factor in compute, energy, hardware, and maintenance?
Right now AI is heavily subsidized by investor money and infrastructure spending. The real long-term test is whether the economics still make sense once that normalizes.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@priyanka_gosai1 I am not very happy about this prognoss tho :D
i feel like white collar jobs get hit first... replacing software work with more software is way easier than replacing physical workers with robots... also people seriously underestimate how much energy and infrastructure ai actually needs behind the scene
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@nidaezahraaa It seems that it will be the case. I already felt it back in 2024, when AI started being used massively.
Just a curious observation: people are saying AI would replace software engineers, but most VCs would pass on teams without a technical founder. Is it more because the technology is not fully ready, or that AI's role is compression, not replacement?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@zanc_zhao Being a VC, I would have to have trust in the team, and they should have some past results.
I also think white-collar jobs will feel the impact first.
A lot of digital work:
writing
analysis
support
coordination
can already be partially automated with AI.
Blue-collar work is physically harder to replace at scale because robotics is expensive, slower to deploy, and depends heavily on real-world environments.
But I don’t think it becomes “humans vs AI.”
More likely:
small teams + AI replacing large teams without AI.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@harithavijayakumar This is a valid point and pretty accur8. BTW, even when AI started, I was asked to lower the price. Now, it is on a bigger scale.
@busmark_w_nika Yes, that’s another huge shift.
AI increases productivity, but at the same time it also changes perceived value and pricing expectations. Suddenly people expect:
faster work
cheaper work
more output
Which probably means the long-term advantage becomes less about “access to AI” and more about:
taste, trust, execution, and unique insight.
Coworker AI
all the collars!
😂 just kidding, we were poking fun at exactly this in our launch video today.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@kohnigel I love it, perfect work with the video :D
Coworker AI
@busmark_w_nika ty!
I think white-collar goes first, pretty clearly.
Not because every human gets replaced 1:1, but because companies that use AI structurally will either replace a large share of work or, ideally, expand what they can deliver with the same team.
The key point is: the endgame is not “everyone uses this AI tool”. That is just the first step. The real leverage comes when companies build actual workflows around it: skills, agents, guardrails, review loops and so on.
A lot of the intellectual work will shift into designing these skills and agent instructions.
Once those systems are good, they scale insanely well and can work in parallel in a way humans simply cannot.
Even very intellectual jobs are easier to automate than physical work right now. The expensive part in white-collar work is often the human intelligence, and AI is making that much cheaper.
In blue-collar work, the human worker is often still relatively affordable, while the automation itself is expensive and hard to deploy.
So economically, it seems obvious to me that white-collar gets hit first...
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@christian_dubray What kind of white-collar worker can secure a job, and what should they have?
@busmark_w_nika
Hard not to drift into dystopia here...
In guess in the medium term, the people who benefit most will probably be "decision-makers" and the ones who know how to roll out AI structurally inside companies.
I would not build my future value proposition around doing the same work as before.
Most likely, the safest people will be the ones who adapt fastest. But who knows.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@christian_dubray I need to adapt some ADHD pattern to know how to switch between things or so.
BetterClaw
white collar first and it won't even be close. AI is already writing emails, summarizing meetings, doing research, drafting reports. the physical world is way harder to automate than a spreadsheet. but I think the real shift isn't replacement its compression.. 5 person teams becoming 2 person teams doing the same output
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@tina_chhabra What is your time estimation for replacement of both categories?
Arguably white collar. Robotics will still take some time to fully handle all the different blue collar fields.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@spencer_miller_dev but both categories are just matter of time tho
@busmark_w_nika For sure, but in terms of sooner, definitely white collar.