Is SLO County ready for catastrophic, AI-driven job losses? | Opinion
Data indicates that nearly a quarter of SLO County’s work force could be out of a job by 2031 due to displacement by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence — AI — today impacts one in four jobs worldwide and is projected to cause the biggest labor displacement in modern history. Between 30% and 50% of white-collar jobs are at risk of AI-driven replacement or significant augmentation within the next five years alone.
Are we ready? Are our elected leaders prepared? Do we have a plan and infrastructure to ensure our displaced workers are retrained and ready for a reformed job market?
The U.S. could see staggering economic effects of AI-driven job losses across retail, finance, education, and real-estate sectors alone. For a mid-sized county like ours that relies heavily on tourism, manufacturing, healthcare, and education, a job market shift of this magnitude wouldn’t just rattle SLO County’s economic foundation. It would put our residents at risk. The wise course would be to take action now to avoid an economic conflagration later.
National mass layoffs abound
We’ve seen the news: Amazon, Meta, Google, Intel and other tech giants have been slashing human jobs, replacing them with AI.
At Google-owned YouTube, employees can “voluntarily depart the company” in exchange for a severance package.
UPS fired 48,000 workers this year alone. Some experts say these companies are restructuring to stay nimble for the upcoming techno-economic shift, a “tech-bro” euphemism for complying in advance with AI faddism while raking in record-breaking profits.
It makes sense – AI doesn’t require a living wage, it doesn’t get sick or require health insurance, doesn’t unionize, doesn’t talk back or know the difference between right and wrong.
The jobs at risk aren’t what you think
In the first weeks of November alone an estimated 21,000 AI-related layoffs were announced nationally. These jobs are mostly entry level, college-graduate positions (accounting, finance, engineering, and administration) and partly hospitality jobs (retail, food service, tourism). Less than 1% of jobs at risk of AI replacement are blue-collar.
AI-driven layoffs disproportionately impact marginalized workers. According to a 2025 UN report, women are excessively at risk of job loss due to their over-representation in administrative and accounting roles rapidly being outsourced to generative AI models. Women of color are especially vulnerable.
When mapping Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s projection that AI could impact half of entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next five years to SLO County’s 143,000-person workforce, by analyzing vulnerable occupational categories including the number of management, business, financial, and professional roles, the results are stark: approximately 20,100 to 33,500 local workers could be displaced. This isn’t something to worry about in the future — this is happening now, and we’re not ready.
Retraining SLO County and redefining the future of work
There’s a lot we can do to prepare our county for the upcoming workforce diaspora, and SLO County is well positioned to model practical, human-centered AI governance and position ourselves as a future-oriented county.
A significant redefining of job description and restructuring of roles and responsibilities is taking place before our eyes. Because of this, experts warn that successfully navigating the AI job market usurpation hinges on proactive employee and community upskilling.
The World Economic Forum describes how jobs “vanish overnight while new ones emerge,” but there’s a catch — these emerging jobs require completely new sets of skills that at-risk workers don’t have, nor the infrastructure for obtaining. Some 92% of jobs now require digital skills — even entry-level ones.
Worker upskilling is the most important action our federal, state, and local governments can take to prepare for the digital takeover. Transparency measures such as the proposed bipartisan AI-driven layoff transparency bill would require companies and federal agencies to disclose AI-related layoff reports. Creating AI impact assessment committees and partnering with academia and industry to develop cross-sector AI-adoption coalitions are also integral steps toward durable infrastructure and policy preparedness.
This isn’t just tech-bubble hype. Every relevant research institution (ex., RAND, GovAI, CSET, WEF, UN) is screaming about it. Their message is the same: governments have to act now.
Even tech leaders are warning governments worldwide of their need to upskill workers and increase AI literacy quickly or the results could be catastrophic.
If this sounds dystopian and scary, it’s because it is. But we don’t need to panic as much as we need to be clear — this is happening in the present tense and we need to get to work. The risks are real, and the impacts of AI-related job displacement are already being felt nationally.
So, what are we going to do about it in SLO County? The time to decide is now.
Clara Fulks is a digital ethicist and consultant specializing in AI safety and information integrity. Born, raised and based in San Luis Obispo, Clara holds an MSc in artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in linguistics from San Diego State University.