by Gary Alexander
March 10, 2026
Hardly a week goes by without a new warning that AI will costs millions of jobs – heck, maybe even 300-million jobs by 2030. One early report (2018) predicted a loss of up to 800-million global jobs by 2030.
A more modest 2023 report forecast AI could impact 300-million jobs, and more recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could wipe out half of all entry-level jobs from 2025 to 2030. Also, the latest World Economic Forum estimated 92-million jobs would be displaced by 2030, although they were sane enough to counter this with 170-million new jobs being created, but firings, not hiring make headlines.
Last week’s Wall Street Journal covered a new Goldman Sachs report saying AI will eventually displace 11-million jobs – above 6% of U.S. workers. The report also talked about a corresponding 30% gain in productivity, boosting GDP and corporate earnings, but the loss of 6% of workers earned the headline, since bad news sells. The report also said companies that discussed AI in the fourth-quarter “cut their job openings by 12%,” but any list of job openings implies new hires, more jobs ahead, replacing posts lost. (“Goldman Sachs Predicts AI Will Eventually Displace 6% of U.S. Workers,” Heather Gillers, WSJ, March 3, 2026).
I’ve heard these scary stories several times in my 80-years. When my father took me to New York City 70-years ago, he showed me some new modes of transportation and dining, including waiter-free dining in a huge room called the Automat, run by Horn & Hardart. You put in a few nickels or dimes and opened the vault to a delicious slice of blackberry pie, my weakness. Dad and several others said this new technology would put restaurants out of business, but instead this style of impersonal dining led to the birth of fast food chains, which didn’t exist until those Golden Arches began spreading across the nation in the 1960s.
In 1968 and in the late 1970s, I worked in a computer-center where giant Big Blue mainframes were predicted to put millions of clerks and book-keepers out of work. Instead, these big computers gave birth to a new generation of smaller business and personal-computers which employed millions in new fields.
Long-term, as the following chart shows, America has created an average of 1.5-million net new jobs per year since 1940, as our robust economy easily absorbed massive new waves of workers: Baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964), former housewives entering the labor force, and millions of new immigrants:
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
This trend began long before 1940. John D. Rockefeller’s low-cost kerosene put whale hunters in dry-dock. Autos and trains put horseshoe makers and carriage makers out of work. Telephones put telegram clickers on hold. Companies are always at risk if they don’t keep up with newer and better technologies.
Back in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes, the dominant economist of that decade, warned of a coming era of “technological unemployment.” Others called industrial automation a “Frankenstein monster” destined to destroy jobs and a committee of dominant Keynesian economists of the 1960s warned President Lyndon Johnson about a “cyber-nation revolution” (computers) wiping out manual labor.
Last Friday’s Jobs Report Deepened the Job Market Gloom
Last Friday, the market continued its gloomy late-winter mood after the February jobs report came out, saying we’ve seen a job loss of 32,000 since June, while the jobless rate rose from 4.1% in July to 4.4%:
One thing to notice in this list is the alternating rising months (July, September, November and January) with answering negative months. There’s no consistency in this data, although it says we’re losing jobs.
Turning to the kinds of jobs lost, the information sector only lost 11,000-jobs in February, far exceeded by health services (-28k), due mostly to labor union actions, and leisure and hospitality (-27k), so the loss of jobs by computer programmers to “AI” bots needs some rethinking (as jobs are needed to monitor AI).
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Almost daily we read of companies laying off 4,000 or 10,000 or more, but mention is seldom made of the millions of new-jobs these companies created during the previous decade. For instance, the big headlines declared 4,000-layoffs at Fed Ex, but do you recall any headlines covering their 100,000 net new-hires from 2020 to 2022? In a more extreme case, we’ve been assaulted by news that Amazon has eliminated approximately 30,000 “corporate roles” in 2025 and early 2026, but do you recall any headline covering the 1.4-million new jobs Amazon created, 2015 to 2022? (Hiring seldom make the headlines).
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
Based on history, I’ll predict AI may reduce demand for certain jobs, but it will inevitably create more positions than it eliminates, as savvy workers and companies will adapt to these emerging technologies.
Jobs are never guaranteed – except for tenured college professors, I suppose – but this sort of dynamic job market is also a recipe for national growth. Any guaranteed lifetime employment leads to what Soviet workers mumbled: “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work.” Nothing creates an economic crisis more than “guaranteed employment,” (translation: few are hired). Europe’s unemployment rates were in double-digits from 2001 to 2015, but the EU has recently learned how to rethink their “guaranteed jobs.”
Graphs are for illustrative and discussion purposes only. Please read important disclosures at the end of this commentary.
After spending 64-years in the U.S. Labor Force – starting in 1962 at age 16 with a 22-mile paper route covering a major new Seattle suburb, I moved on to being a night janitor in college, then mail-answering editor, news bureau researcher and then financial journalism by age 22. I’ve had to change the nature and location of my work several times since 1962. Smart workers will always look for greater job security by being irreplaceable in the talents they offer, showing willingness to learn and serving the customer well.
All content above represents the opinion of Gary Alexander of Navellier & Associates, Inc.
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A Look Ahead by Louis Navellier
Friday’s Downbeat Jobs Report May be Misleading
Income Mail by Bryan Perry
Three Compelling High Yield Opportunities
Growth Mail by Gary Alexander
Will AI Really Destroy America’s Job Market?
Global Mail by Ivan Martchev
When Oil Reverses, the Stock Market Will Bottom
Sector Spotlight by Jason Bodner
Don’t Let Market Volatility Upset You
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About The Author
Gary Alexander
SENIOR EDITOR
Gary Alexander has been Senior Writer at Navellier since 2009. He edits Navellier’s weekly Marketmail and writes a weekly Growth Mail column, in which he uses market history to support the case for growth stocks. For the previous 20-years before joining Navellier, he was Senior Executive Editor at InvestorPlace Media (formerly Phillips Publishing), where he worked with several leading investment analysts, including Louis Navellier (since 1997), helping launch Louis Navellier’s Blue Chip Growth and Global Growth newsletters.
Prior to that, Gary edited Wealth Magazine and Gold Newsletter and wrote various investment research reports for Jefferson Financial in New Orleans in the 1980s. He began his financial newsletter career with KCI Communications in 1980, where he served as consulting editor for Personal Finance newsletter while serving as general manager of KCI’s Alexandria House book division. Before that, he covered the economics beat for news magazines. All content of “Growth Mail” represents the opinion of Gary Alexander
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