It is a mystery why the labor force has shrunk; some are early retirees. Some are urban workers who have relocated someplace else and are doing something that doesn’t register as a job. Some are parents – particularly women – who have decided to focus more on their family. 
 
Now, with ChatGPT, more knowledge work is being replaced. “A project that used to take 8 hours now takes 40 minutes” is the way one friend who runs a high-end consulting company puts it.  “I’ll probably fire half of my people in 6 months.” 
 
Another friend said to me, “I have to put in a half-hour of deep thinking to figure out the right prompt to feed the AI, but then after that I just got rid of a task that I was going to pay someone else to do.” 
 
Another entrepreneur said, “I wrote a press release in less than 5 minutes. I fed the AI, got a template and then edited. It was a breeze.” 
 
Unrelated to AI, tech companies have laid off more than 100,000 workers in a reset as their stock prices have gone down. One of the difficult truths is that a significant percentage – probably 20% - of workers in most large organizations are largely irrelevant to how that organization will perform. 
 
Indeed, a lot of the headwinds have been caused by higher interest rates that have forced businesses – tech, banks, real estate, everyone – to have to generate real returns instead of taking free money and lending it, spending it, or basking in a sky-high stock price built on a rosy future. 
 
The transition to more remote work is doubtless a force toward automation. If someone is remote, their job is one step closer to being replaced. The return to office work is highly uneven. Workers prefer remote or hybrid work and are making career decisions accordingly. Unfortunately, eventually so will employers.   
 
For years now, the proportion of repetitive manual and repetitive cognitive jobs in the economy has been falling relative to high-end cognitive jobs.  Repetitive jobs comprise 44% of jobs in the economy.  This week, a University of Pennsylvania study suggested that AI will impact about 80% of all workers to some extent.