The real threat of AI is not unemployment, but preventing your salary from rising. A newly released white paper by Apollo Global Management gives a counter-intuitive judgment: AI may not directly take away people’s jobs, but it may take the lead in lowering wages.

The real threat of AI is not unemployment, but making it impossible for your wages to rise. A newly released white paper by Apollo Global Management makes a counter-intuitive judgment: AI may not directly take away people’s jobs, but it may take the lead in lowering wages. The study, which tracked wage and employment data for 321 occupations, showed that since 2023—roughly coinciding with the time when ChatGPT began to explode in popularity—real wage growth in jobs with the highest exposure to AI has dropped by an average of 6.7%. Research has not yet found that AI has a "detectable" impact on overall employment, which means that what more people are currently facing is not unemployment anxiety, but the reality that it is becoming increasingly difficult to raise wages. Low-income groups bear the brunt, and programmers are not immune. The distribution of wage shocks is extremely uneven. Since 2023, the income growth rate of workers in the service industry has dropped by 24.3% on average, and the wages of workers in the bottom 25% have fallen by 10.7%, while the highest-paid group of workers has not been "significantly affected." The researchers also used the Anthropic Economic Index to assess exposure based on the proportion of tasks in each occupation that were actually completed using AI tools. Looking at specific occupations, the real wages of computer programmers fell by 6.1%, statistical assistants fell by 5.4%, software quality analysts fell by 2.9%, and database architects fell by 2.7%—these traditionally high-skilled positions also failed to escape the downward pressure on wages brought by AI. The white paper estimates that approximately 5.8 million workers in the United States hold jobs with high exposure to AI, and that number is likely to rise significantly as AI accelerates its penetration into the corporate world. Of course, there is another side to the coin. More than one-third of the work tasks of personal financial advisors may be affected by AI, and their wages have increased by 8.4%; approximately 30% of the work tasks of administrative law judges are within the scope of AI radiation, and their wages have increased by 17.5% during the same period. This shows that the impact of AI on wages is not uniform, and that some occupations have increased their output value due to AI assistance. But for most high-exposure positions, AI brings not the fear of job disappearance, but a more subtle erosion - you still have a job, but the bargaining chips for salary increases are quietly shrinking. This may be the truest narrative unfolding in the labor market in the AI ​​era. via AI News (author: AI Base)