Artificial intelligence appears to accelerate existing wage polarization trends by enhancing high-skill workers’ productivity while displacing or stagnating middle-skill workers. This creates increasingly bifurcated labor markets with shrinking middles, raising concerns about inequality and social mobility.
Research shows 60% of jobs in wealthy nations and 40% globally will be affected by AI. Impacts vary dramatically by skill level, with the approximately 10% of AI-enhanced jobs concentrated among higher-skilled workers seeing wage gains. Middle-skill workers face displacement or stagnation, while some low-skill personal service work resists automation.
Young workers face pressure to acquire high-level skills to access AI-enhanced opportunities, but entry-level positions that traditionally built toward middle-skill careers disappear. This creates a gap where pathways to middle-class employment through workplace experience become less viable, increasing educational barriers to economic security.
Middle-skill workers who previously formed the economic backbone of communities face displacement or wage stagnation as AI performs their work or enables high-skill workers to do it. This hollowing of middle-skill employment threatens social stability and economic mobility patterns.
Governance responses to wage polarization must address both immediate worker support and long-term labor market structure. Labor organizations emphasize the need for policies that create middle-class opportunities in an AI economy. International cooperation could address global wage polarization patterns, though differing national approaches to inequality and labor markets complicate coordination.