One way to avoid AI altogether? Retire early

Some older workers are choosing to retire rather than wrangle with artificial intelligence. From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Stephanie Hughes. The share of older workers in the U.S. is on the decline. About 37% of people age 55 and above are now active in the labor force. About a decade ago, it was around 40%. The pandemic chased some older workers out. Others can simply afford to retire. If the golf course beckons and you have the money, why not? Still another factor that's causing some to exit, the emergence of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Learning how to interact with it as a tool, maybe even a colleague, seems like a headache to some. So, they're choosing retirement instead. Lauren Weber with The Wall Street Journal has been reporting on this. She told me about one 68-year-old man who's decided to opt out. So he started his career as a graphic designer and ended up as a content strategist working for a hospital system. And he said, I've been through desktop publishing. I've been through the arrival of the Internet and having to learn how to do online publishing. He was like, I just don't want to go through another one of these technological changes. And he's not shunning AI. He said he's using it to learn Spanish. He just wants to use it for himself. He doesn't want to have to learn this for an employer or for someone else. So it's not necessarily that older workers feel they can't master these tools or even don't want to master these tools. It's partly that you've been in the workforce for decades. And it's like, I want to basically do things for myself right now. There is something kind of poignant about institutional knowledge and intelligence being pushed out by artificial intelligence. And it makes me wonder, what could companies and younger workers be losing here? AI can only capture what is online. What you lose is anything that is not capturable by a computer or by an algorithmic model. And a lot of that has to do with relating to people, communication, along with some of that knowledge and information that's just kind of quirky and that people pick up over time and is not necessarily in a document somewhere that an AI model is going to pick up on. So I do think things are lost when older workers exit the workforce without some process for having passed on a lot of what they know, and especially those things that are maybe a little more nuanced and harder to capture. I was looking at the labor participation rate for older workers over the decades, and I noticed another time period when it was even lower than it is now was the early 1990s. This was right after the emergence of the World Wide Web. And I wondered, is this just something that happens whenever there's a big technological shift? I have a feeling that the increase in labor force participation had more to do with people's health being better, more in longevity than anything else necessarily in the workplace. And I really wonder if the transition to the internet, the World Wide Web, was anything like this current AI transformation. This seems to me so much faster. I mean, I was in the workforce in the early 90s. I had graduated from college right around then. And what I see happening now is just much, much, much more rapid. And so I think people had time to adapt in previous periods of technological disruption. We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech, I'm Stephanie Hughes. We're back with Lauren Weber, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lauren, can you talk a little bit more about the adoption of AI and the workplace and how it may be different from other technological shifts? Yeah, I think this technology has the potential to take on so many tasks and to do so much more. Like when you think about the internet and the way that that may have changed how work was done or how business was done, I think a lot of it was like companies just decided to have websites. You can now shop online in the 90s that started. This is something that is really getting to the heart of so many of the tasks that people do at work. I don't think the internet, it made it easier for you to find a phone number. I mean, sometimes I can't believe that we were ever reporters before the internet. How did anybody find a phone number? So the internet was great for information finding and for making information really accessible. But AI is actually changing core elements of the tasks that we do. And everybody is trying to figure it out at once. It's incredibly expensive for the companies that are using it at scale and trying to use a lot of it. And I think that the pressure on workers to figure out how to do this at a time when companies really want to save money. I mean, companies always want to save money, but it really feels like there's a lot of companies out there trying to figure out how can we do this work with fewer people. I think that there is a real sense of panic for some people and a feeling that this is just moving so, so quickly. And that feels different to me. Are there any things employers can do to make the shift to AI less jarring for older workers and maybe pull out of them? I would say not just for older workers, but maybe for everyone. Some companies are doing a lot of internal training. I know my own company is doing that. We have a lot of lunch and learns. And I love learning from my colleagues and from the people who are really like the early adopters here. So I think a lot of training is helpful. How to make it like less intimidating or less scary for people. I think not making someone feel like you're going to lose your job if you haven't figured out how to be twice as productive by the end of the year. But on the workers are right to be afraid right now. The whole contract between workers and employers has been sort of eroded over years. So I don't think anybody should be lulled into feeling like their company is going to be loyal to them, no matter how well or poorly they adopt this technology or how quickly or slowly. That's Lauren Weber at the Wall Street Journal. We'll have a link to her story on our website, marketplacetech.org. Hazer Solvarado produced this episode. I'm Stephanie Hughes and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.