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So far, the narrative of AI in the workplace has had a consistent victim: the recent college grad<\/a>, supposedly first on the chopping block as large language models automate the types of low level tasks that traditionally provided an on-ramp to office careers.<\/p>\n New evidence, however, suggests the tech may be impacting a surprisingly different segment of the workforce: those closest to retirement.<\/p>\n In a recent study<\/a> by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, economics professor Geoffrey Sanzenbacher took a hard look at labor data in order to map AI\u2019s impact on older workers in the United States. Comparing government job data against an AI-exposure index \u2014 a data set that tracks the degree to which certain occupations hinge on tasks that AI can do \u2014 Sanzenbacher compared the number of workers 55 and older leaving the workforce before and after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.<\/p>\n Though the researcher caveats that the \u201cimpact of AI on\u00a0any\u00a0workers, let alone those near retirement, remains an open question,\u201d his findings point to an alarming shift. Prior to ChatGPT, older workers in the most AI-exposed jobs \u2014 highly-trained knowledge worker gigs like coding and tax preparation \u2014 were more likely to work later into their lives compared to those in manual labor.<\/p>\n \u201cThe types of jobs exposed to AI used to have a relative advantage with respect to career longevity,\u201d Sanzenbacher explains. \u201cIn the post-ChatGPT era, the nearly offsetting bars for \u2018not working\u2019 suggest that this advantage has been greatly reduced, with a significant share of the increase due to unemployment.\u201d<\/p>\n Though that general pattern still holds overall, Sanzenbacher observes that after the release of ChatGPT, the share of workers 55 and up leaving white collar work is surging. That\u2019s not necessarily because folks are taking early retirements either; as Sanzenbacher writes, \u201cafter the ChatGPT launch\u2026 AI-exposed jobs saw relative increases in total transitions out of work and specifically to unemployment (but not out of the labor force).\u201d <\/p>\n Said another way, growing numbers of older white collar workers are being pushed out of the airplane before they\u2019re ready to jump, with little more than a blue Walmart vest<\/a> as a parachute.<\/p>\n