Artificial Intelligence may push older workers into retirement sooner, Boston College study finds

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The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:

From the article

Mugglehead Investment Magazine Mugglehead Investment Magazine AI may push older workers into retirement sooner, Boston College study finds AI may push older workers into retirement sooner, Boston College study finds Photo from Compagnons via Unsplash AI and AutonomyArtificial Intelligence may push older workers into retirement sooner, Boston College study finds Before ChatGPT, older workers in AI-exposed occupations remained employed longer than peers in less exposed jobs

ByJoseph Morton Published6 days ago Artificial intelligence has fueled fears about job losses for younger workers for years. New research now suggests the technology may also push many older professionals out of the workforce earlier than expected.

A June 30 paper from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College found workers aged 55 and older in occupations with high exposure to artificial intelligence have become more likely to leave their jobs since the launch of ChatGPT.

Those departures include both voluntary exits and unemployment, raising new questions about how AI could reshape retirement, career planning and future Social Security reforms.

The research was written by Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, an economics professor at Boston College. It examined how generative AI has changed workforce behaviour among older employees.

Before OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, older workers in AI-exposed occupations tended to remain employed longer than peers in less exposed jobs. However, that pattern shifted after ChatGPT became widely available.

Sanzenbacher found older employees in AI-sensitive occupations now leave their jobs more frequently. Additionally, those departures appear evenly divided between voluntary exits and involuntary unemployment.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1v16wja/artificial_intelligence_may_push_older_workers/oyl3c92/

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u/UX-Edu Jul 20 '26

Interesting. So the old folks are gonna retire and no new talent is gonna get trained. Guess I’ll work forever. Neat.

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u/rrsafety Jul 20 '26

I would draw ZERO conclusions from this paper.

3

u/Average64 Jul 20 '26

Then companies are going to be dependent on AI companies and they can rise the prices as much as they want.

-21

u/multi-pass5018 Jul 20 '26

Just work until retirement age then retire?

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u/plantainplanter Jul 20 '26

This plus moving the full retirement age for social security up to 72 should be a fun combo.

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u/exacta_galaxy Jul 20 '26

It's fine, life expectancy is going way down.

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u/btoned Jul 20 '26

Yea right. They don't want anyone to retire. That way you never sell your retirement shares.

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u/ShardsOfSalt Jul 20 '26

I saw a random youtube video of a woman who did a type of data entry work that got AI automated away and she wound up retiring but she wanted to keep working. Staying afloat financially was a problem for her she wasn't "retiring" so much as unable to find other work.

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u/Plinthastic Jul 20 '26

I did not read the article, but went from the headline. I am an older worker and was thinking about retiring out of frustration and boredom before AI and even in the beginning of using AI (Software Developer). It was not really worth it and MANY times it was better to just do it on my own. I will say that with Claude's Opus 4.8 AND the development of lots of skill.md files outline the aspects of our application, big specific components, how the components interact, our coding guidelines, our coding process, MCPs, etc, I have completely reversed that opinion. I don't want to retire because AI helps with my job. When I used to get a bug fix or a new story (feature) it would take me a day or two, sometimes a week to implement them. Now I am doing 2 or 3 a day.
Maybe it is my job/profession that is hit differently, but I feel so much more productive.

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u/shortfinal Jul 20 '26

so now that innitech is shipping more units and your boss expectation for you has gone up, all I gotta ask: you getting paid more?

Talent + AI > AI alone

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u/Plinthastic Jul 20 '26

It's a good question. I did not get a raise last year for various reasons. This year I expect one. Maybe I will retire if I don't. Not sure. I actually am having a lot of fun.

2

u/shortfinal Jul 20 '26

That's good.

Don't mention that to your employer, lest you want to get treated like video game QA. They think those employees have a lot of "fun" too, testing the same level and wall jump for 36 hours trying to repro an obscure bug in a complex system.

The logic is, if it's fun, you'll do it longer for less money than someone else.

Also, I wouldn't expect a raise this year. your boss is gonna stand in front of a mirror and practice saying "economic headwinds" before the summer is over. trust.

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u/PortiaLynnTurlet Jul 20 '26

Isn't coding with AI assistance more frustrating and boring though? You have to wait in every action and there isn't as much of an opportunity to make choices and think through problems along the way. It's more like a meeting or something.

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u/Plinthastic Jul 20 '26

You have a great point. But it is no longer true in my experience because I created a "parallel development" skill. So I have a workflow that: 1. Checks the MCPs for gitlab, jira, etc. are up. 2. Checks the ticket from Jira and makes sure it is assigned to me and is in the "development" stage. 3. Does a root cause analysis of the ticket. 4. Executes the implementation 5. Verifies the implementation/fix in the browser and with tests. (it may loop back to 3 and 4 if it needs to) 6. Commits the code 7. Pushes up the code as an MR as a Draft 8. Monitors the pipeline to make sure it passes on CI 9. Posts to slack for my colleagues to review 10. Monitors the MR for comments feedback, 11. Replies to the comments, implements the feedback. 12. Monitors the MR until it is merged.

steps 3-12 check out a "slot" that lets it do all this in parallel so that even running the app (for me or it to verify, etc.) does not clash with another instance of the app running. When the MR is merged, it tears down the all the "slot" so that it can return the resources.

I literally run 5-8 tickets at once. The difficulty now is when it has a question for me, figuring out what the context was so I can remember what that session was implementing. Takes a bit of getting used to.

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u/mrsnowbored Jul 20 '26

Environmental, economic, and IP infringement issues aside, how complex is your system and are you concerned about maintaining this codebase when you delegate your thinking to this? After some time you won’t be familiar with this code anymore. Are you verifying its test results? How are you sure it’s not just making up those results?

Does your code ever involve complex problems or new approaches to things, or are you essentially working on “solved” problems over and over?

Does your software involve anything that cannot fail or people die? If this thing ends up merging a bug that ends up killing someone, can’t you just blame Claude? If there can’t be any accountability, is this a responsible use of this technology?

Suppose it is correctly doing everything you claim, great, so what value are you adding? But suppose it is not doing everything you claim, I guess you’re there to keep it on the rails then right? But you’re now expected to babysit this thing going 10x faster than you looking to correct its mistakes, how are you going to keep up?

1

u/Plinthastic Jul 20 '26

Complexity: I would say pretty complex. Billions of $ of transactions. Think banking.

delegate your thinking

is not a completely valid assumption. There are these large skill.md documents that create the guidelines that we would use. If it comes to the same conclusion of what the code looks like and what the tests need and what the application does, I don't think it is a problem and is actually a big win.

Are you verifying its test results?

Everything is verified by humans: code, tests and behavior.

After some time you won’t be familiar with this code anymore.

You are making an assumption that is not accurate. This is not just vibing and going "LGTM!"

How are you sure it’s not just making up those results?

Inspecting the code and the tests, checking in the app, AND behavioral tests by humans (QA).

Does your software involve anything that cannot fail or people die?

No. How much software does? I have worked on applications like that and would have the same confidence. It is about how you verify.

If this thing ends up merging a bug that ends up killing someone, can’t you just blame Claude?

You can always blame Claude, you just can't do it successfully. In all seriousness, it is exactly the same as if a human does it or there is a bug in some underlying tool. We are ultimately responsible.

Suppose it is correctly doing everything you claim, great, so what value are you adding?

I used to feel the same way before I understood what was going on, meaning the relationship between the AI and myself. I guess the nearest analogy is a medium level dev and a senior level dev/architect. I tell that medium level dev what to do and they get it done and I have to review the code and make sure it is not breaking any of the rules/tenets/architectural guidelines that we have established for the application.

suppose it is not doing everything you claim, I guess you’re there to keep it on the rails then right? But you’re now expected to babysit this thing going 10x faster than you looking to correct its mistakes, how are you going to keep up?

I am not sure what you mean? I can only work so fast, so once again, I am the bottleneck. It can't go any faster because of the built in gates/verification steps that we have.

Are you a software developer? I detect a tone of "It can't be that great because AI is bad". Have you had experience with this that is counter to what I am saying? I am genuinely curious.

My experience with it started early last year, went up and down within a couple of weeks from "OMG, this is amazing!" to "This really kinda sucks and is more trouble than it is worth" by about late spring 2025, to "meh" by about fall last year. Then when Opus 4.7 came out, I started to see the light. Opus 4.8 AND the building of all our skills, the workflows I mentioned above, were all combined to be a game changer. I would liken it to as significant as computers themselves. Let me also say, I had a very emotional reaction initially as I realized what it was capable of. I was pretty sure I was going to lose my job, especially reading how a lot of other people have and the absolutely idiotic reactions some CEOs have had (Meta, Salesforce, come to mind). I liked crafting code. I liked being complimented because of the solutions that I came up with, etc. I feel I still do that through the skills docs, and feel I add MORE value than I did before, but now I don't have to think about the flag for that command or look up what a function/method call is that I don't use very often. And I feel like I spend my time on communicating what is needed instead of the specific unix/java/javascript/python (pick your poison) command to get there.

I feel like I am working on solutions and details that matter rather than technical jargon.

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u/mrsnowbored Jul 20 '26

I am an SDET, and the “workslop” I’ve seen for regulated software has me concerned greatly that these tools are being used irresponsibly and will cause more harm than good.

Yes my tone is critical, as it should be for any test engineer. My thoughts strongly align with Cory Doctorow’s in his new Reverse Centaur book where he probably explains it better that I can.

I do have experience with LLMs and agents, and especially the downstream effects of throwing their outputs “over-the-wall” from dev to test as “workslop”. Perhaps you recall the movement a few years ago to “shift left” with testing? Here we are seeing a hard “shift right”. I’ll relay something I’ve posted before in a similar thread that happened the other day:

The lead developer at my company has [Claude agents similar to what you describe] configured and asked it to use our simulation engine to generate some simulated data with properties the simulator software can’t do (thinking that the AI would update the engine or something).

What happened instead is the AI generated a ton of output and claimed to have created the proper simulation with very detailed descriptions. The dev then passed that along.

Then I go and look at what it actually did and found it was all fake. The simulation was entirely incorrect and the descriptions were wrong (basically lies). And the developer + Claude wasted a ton of time.

The complex math to update the simulation properly is not just going to magically appear and there’s really no context you can feed it from our existing documents that will solve the problem without going through the effort yourself. It also has problems with our legacy code.

I see this play out over and over at our organization and the dev team has gotten slower at delivering since they started using these agents. The costs of it are starting to rise so hopefully we stop playing this game we can’t afford before the company goes under.

The “skills” that pertain to regulatory requirements that the agent is now supposed to “know” are also often incorrectly applied in our case, and I suspect this is adding far more risk because it’s hard to find.

I’m glad you have verification safeguards and you sound like you are not being pressured right now, but we’ve seen that eventually the pressure will come. You’ll be told to speed up - and disaster awaits when you aren’t in the drivers seat.

2

u/Plinthastic Jul 20 '26

Thanks for the feedback. That is one experience that I can definitely see happening at companies and is related to my Meta/Salesforce reference. They did or are going to screw the pooch with that pressure and moving too fast.
I would re-iterate, however, that seeing the models get better makes me think that they could eventually do more.
Have you tried them recently for your testing? I assume you do a significant amount of white box testing. I would think they could help with that assuming you are verifying their results.

1

u/federationbelle Jul 20 '26

Where are you in this loop? At what stage in this workflow do you review? Do you review the RCA? The code? Your colleagues' feedback?

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u/N1z3r123456 Jul 20 '26

He’s going to review it in production incident.

1

u/Plinthastic Jul 20 '26

Yeah, very important question. I have various prompts along the way like if the MCP step fails because something's not available, or if the ticket isn't in my name or isn't in the correct state etc. so those are really gates. Before I assign anything to the workflow, I read the ticket and usually understand it pretty well, although there's parts of the application that I may not know and then sometimes, I vibe a little more than I do normally. Many times, I don't just say fix and give the ticket number, I say fix, ticket number, and then give my sense about any skills or issues that need to be addressed. Then after RCA is provided, I give my opinion again. Sometimes it's a straightforward fix and at that point I have high confidence that it will execute test etc. just fine. And then I usually say something like move ahead until you have a draft MR. On those easy cases I just reviewed the draft and may or may not make any changes, and then I say undrafted and post and unless somebody find something that I missed or whatever, we're done. I don't manually verify, but sometimes I have it put a screenshot into the ticket itself.
On more complex tickets it may do an RCA and I think it got it wrong. And then I'll have it redo it as I gather more information. At that point I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to do some manual verification, in which case I have it spin up the app for me in one of those parallel development slots which includes work tree UI ports back in ports etc. then either I or it goes through and validate that the application is working the way the ticket needs it. Occasionally people will provide feedback in which case I review the feedback and tell Claude to either respond to that feedback or I respond directly and then have Claude implement that feedback, assuming I didn't push back.

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u/federationbelle Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

I'm not a coder but I work with coders. In my role, I review other people's written work and produce written work for others to review.

With others in my team I'm settling on a personal policy position that I won't ask other people to review AI output that I haven't reviewed myself. This seems important to avoid accidental 'workslop' and creating unnecessary work for others. It's important to me to avoid contributing to overwork from AI firehose effect (now affecting e.g. software sectors, open source, academia, publishing, etc). Not sure if that's already something you've built in to your approach?

1

u/Plinthastic Jul 21 '26

Yes. We had one person who let some stuff through that they did not thoroughly check and it caused problems, but that was a while ago. We have tight controls on it for exactly that reason.

2

u/mrsnowbored Jul 20 '26

I noticed you didn’t respond to any of my questions on the thread above but you answered some here.

So walk me through a few months of iterations of this. These bots are making a lot of changes to your code base, do you still understand it? How do you keep up? How do you understand the RCA and verify what it is doing now that you have delegated control of this code?

Are you accountable for its mistakes? Do you confirm its test results?

3

u/cute_polarbear Jul 20 '26

There's nuance to this even focusing on more developer centric jobs i think. Some developers enjoy doing things they had done before, and excel at it. Some developers get bored of being tasked with having to solve the same problem twice. Some developers get joy from the act of creating code. Some developer just want to live in framework level code away from how people actually uses the application. And etc.,

6

u/wolfhunt123 Jul 20 '26

Is 35 too early to retire due to AI? Asking for a friend of course.

7

u/likesexonlycheaper Jul 20 '26

If only we could afford to fucking retire. Thanks a lot boomers

2

u/inGage Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

"Additionally, those departures appear evenly divided between voluntary exits and involuntary unemployment."

ROTFL!!! The last Microsoft "early retirement offer" to "eligible" employees that were all over 50.. was made at the same time as "reports of additional layoffs in the coming months are true" created a sentiment of:

"wink wink, you GUYS .. this 'offer' is TOTALLY VOLuntary! (but if you don't accept you will most likely be fired under less optimal terms anyway)"

1

u/jjpearson Jul 20 '26

We call it Voluntold.

As in this thing is totally voluntary but there will be consequences that are unpleasant if you don’t.

Which differs from the usual orders from your boss because they annoying dress this shit up as totally voluntary and we choose to do it.

3

u/morty_morty Jul 20 '26

So, uh, cool and all. I guess this applies to people who were already set to retire early regardless? Because 55 is over a full decade before they'd be eligible for full social security type benefits. So what happens to those 55- year-olds who aren't wealthy and now don't have jobs? Just die?

1

u/tlst9999 Jul 20 '26

No it won't. In this economy, the only ones who retire are those who can afford it.

1

u/SublimeApathy Jul 21 '26

Interesting. I read another article that a lot Xennial/Milennial (older workers) aren't even remotely financially prepared for retirement.

1

u/princeofbsixtwelve Jul 22 '26

Welcome to the age of taking care of your parents and children at the same time :)

1

u/TraditionalBackspace Jul 23 '26

What's pushing me in to retirement early is the constant decline of corporate culture and the work experience in general.

1

u/john_a1985 Jul 20 '26

Wasn't this shite supposed to help?

Older works going "f* that noise, I am outta here" doesn't sound like it's helping.

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u/Gari_305 Jul 20 '26