This Thanksgiving, worry more about AI taking your job - and less about throwing money away on Black Friday

By Brett Arends

Watch out - AI is coming for your job.

This Thanksgiving, give thanks if you still have a job. And spare an ominous thought for the likely situation at the next turkey day in 12 months' time - millions may not be so lucky.

Artificial intelligence is coming. The massive mania for AI stocks on Wall Street only makes sense if artificial intelligence is going to sweep through the jobs market like a tornado.

A new report from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology makes for alarming reading. By its calculations, as many as 18 million U.S. jobs, or 11.7% of the total, are at risk from AI. That's on top of the 3.3 million jobs in technology and related fields that people are already talking about.

This news isn't simply something to give the typical worker indigestion on Thursday, but may be enough to make them think twice before wasting too much money on Black Friday as well. People laid off in the AI "jobpocalypse" may want every nickel they can lay their hands on.

"Visible AI adoption concentrated in computing and technology (2.2% of wage value, or approximately $211 billion) represents only the tip of the iceberg," analysts from the MIT task force wrote. "Administrative, financial and professional-services" jobs, currently worth $1.2 trillion in annual pay, can also be replaced partly or totally by AI, they note.

And, they warn, these jobs are spread across the country - not just in the well-known tech hubs in California, Washington state and on the East Coast. South Dakota, Utah and North Carolina have high percentages of jobs at risk, according to their analysis. So do industrial states such as Ohio, Michigan and Tennessee, where many white-collar administrative and coordination roles in factories and supply chains are also at risk.

To come up with these analyses, MIT number crunchers, working with analysts and a supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, created a model of the entire U.S. jobs market - featuring "151 million workers across 923 occupations in 3,000 counties, covering more than 32,000 distinct skills" - alongside an analysis of the capabilities of 13,000 AI tools.

They warn that their analysis is not a direct prediction of job losses, nor does it predict "adoption timelines or net employment effects." But that's easy for them to say. If jobs can be replaced with a free, or nearly free, AI alternative, you can bet they will be. The juggernaut on Wall Street will demand that this happen as fast as humanly possible. And even if AI doesn't replace everyone in your department, it will replace enough that everyone needs to worry.

Meanwhile, Americans once again face enormous marketing pressure to blow money they will need on things that they don't. Black Friday puts the retailers in the black, but keeps consumers in the red. Against offers that you can save 10%, 20%, 30% or more on Friday by buying things, you can actually save 100% by not buying them. This is the only Black Friday deal that is a guaranteed winner.

-Brett Arends

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11-26-25 1608ET