I found myself interested in the papers analysis of wages, so I did some digging.
The researchers model says the following about hourly wage growth in the substantial and extreme scenarios:
- the hourly wage* in the knowledge workers group will fall (-1.1% and 11.5% respectively)
- but the hourly wage* of labor across the rest of the labor force will grow (5.9% and 33.6% respectively)
*Important to note, AFAIK this hourly wage decline/growth is a not measured against 2026 dollars, but the counterfactual of what hourly wages would be in the absence of AI.
Okay, so my first take away from reading these numbers is that declining wages in one group appears to be offset by rising wages in the other group. Not terrible all things considering.
But then I started to think about the difference in hourly wages between the knowledge workers group and the non-knowledge workers group (which I'll now refer to as *K* *N*). I had a sneaking suspicion that the inter group wages gap could be large enough where growth in the non-knowledge share of labor doesn't offset the loss in hourly wages from displaced knowledge workers who find themselves migrating occupations.
Looking through the paper, it breaks these groups down as follows:
K — Knowledge / Cognitive:
- Management, Business and Financial Operations, Computer and Mathematical, Architecture and Engineering, Life, Physical, and Social Science, Community and Social Service, Legal, Educational Instruction and Library, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical, Sales and Related, Office and Administrative Support
N — Non-Knowledge / All Other:
-Healthcare Support, Protective Service, Food Preparation and Serving, Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance, Personal Care and Service, Farming, Fishing, and Forestry, Construction and Extraction, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair, Production, Transportation and Material Moving
So I had GPT Sol 5.6 take each of these occupations and find the mean hourly wage using BLS data [1]. The findings suggest that as of 2026, the simple group average for K is $45.17 vs. $23.67 for N. But this is short sighted as this doesn't take into consideration the different levels of employment in each occupation. I asked ChatGPT to account for this using the same BLS data, which gives a weighted average of $41.50 for K and $23.40 for N.
This means that knowledge workers are currently making ~double what non-knowledge workers make in the US. The crucial question is how does this change when considering the wage decline/growth between K and N across the papers three scenarios?
Here's the breakdown using the simple mean for hourly wage:
Scenario Knowledge Non-knowledge Gap K -> N penalty
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Current $45.17 $23.67 $21.51 47.6%
Modest $45.35 $23.93 $21.42 47.2%
Substantial $45.03 $25.07 $19.97 44.3%
Extreme $39.98 $31.62 $ 8.35 20.9%
Here's the breakdown using the occupation weighted mean for hourly wage:
Scenario Knowledge Non-knowledge Gap K -> N penalty
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Current $41.50 $23.40 $18.10 43.6%
Modest $41.67 $23.66 $18.01 43.2%
Substantial $41.38 $24.78 $16.59 40.1%
Extreme $36.73 $31.26 $ 5.47 14.9%
Looking at these tables, both in the current moment and across all three of the papers scenario, there is a large wage gap between K and N. Outside of the extreme scenario, this gap is >40%!
My immediate takeaways having done this bit of research is that if Anthropic is right and we're on track for either the substantial or extreme scenarios, *then many of us in this thread could see a large loss in hourly wages in the short term future.*
NOTE: I'm not an economist. I push pixels for a living. But if you are an economist and you find gaps in the following analysis, please inform me.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm*