One of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence companies has warned of an “industrial-scale” threat to jobs. For those in their 60s, however, losing work to AI could carry a financial cost long after the redundancy cheque is gone.
Imagine you’re 60 and, after close to four decades in the workforce, things are finally starting to fall into place.
The mortgage might not be completely gone, but it’s heading in the right direction. You’re probably earning more than you were 10 or 20 years ago and, after decades of school fees, bills, family expenses and everything else life has thrown at you, there’s finally an opportunity to put more money into super.
Perhaps you’ve already done the sums. Work until 65, maybe 67, make a few extra super contributions along the way, pay off the house and retire with enough behind you to feel reasonably secure.
Then your job disappears.
The company hasn’t collapsed and you haven’t suddenly become bad at what you do. Your employer has simply discovered that artificial intelligence can perform enough of the work that it no longer needs as many people to do it.
At 30, that could force an unexpected change of career.
At 60, it could change your retirement.
That possibility has become harder to dismiss after Anthropic, the US company behind the Claude AI system, warned Australia’s parliamentary inquiry into artificial intelligence about the potential scale of job disruption.
The company has raised the prospect of governments needing to help workers retrain and find new employment as AI changes the amount and type of human labour businesses require.
Coming from an AI company, rather than a union or a critic of the technology, the warning is significant.
It also points to something easily missed in the broader debate. AI doesn’t need to eliminate an entire profession to put people out of work.
An accounting firm, insurer, media company or large corporate office that once needed 20 people in a team may discover it can produce the same amount of work with 15 because those employees now have AI tools doing part of the load.
The profession still exists, the work still needs to be done and there are simply fewer people being paid to do it.
For the five who leave, age could have a major bearing on what happens next.
Australians have lived through enormous technological changes at work before. Computers transformed offices, ATMs changed banking and the internet upended industries from retail and travel to newspapers and real estate. Jobs disappeared, new ones emerged and millions of people adapted.
AI may follow a similar path, although nobody yet knows how quickly or how deeply the changes will run.
For someone who is 60 today, however, the issue is not simply whether new jobs will eventually be created. It’s whether those jobs arrive in time for them. Someone who loses a career at 30 potentially has another 35 years in the workforce. There is time to retrain, start again in another field, build a new salary and continue accumulating super.
At 60, the runway is much shorter.
A worker who expected to earn $90,000 a year until 67 may have been counting on another seven years of salary and employer super contributions, perhaps topped up with extra contributions once the mortgage and other major expenses eased.
Losing that job can knock all of those plans sideways, particularly if it takes a year to find another position and the replacement job pays substantially less.
Governments often reach for retraining when industries are disrupted. The idea makes sense: if one type of work is disappearing, help people develop the skills required for work that is growing.
For an older worker, there’s an obvious complication. They still have to convince someone to employ them.
Australia already has a documented problem with age discrimination in the workplace. The Australian Human Rights Commission says people over 55 continue to encounter stereotyping and discrimination in employment, and in 2024-25 more than half of complaints received under the Age Discrimination Act related to employment.
People aged 55 to 64 were the largest single age group among those complaints.
That makes the familiar instruction to “retrain” considerably more complicated for someone approaching retirement.
A 60-year-old accountant, administrator, journalist, customer service worker or legal assistant may be perfectly capable of learning new technology and developing new skills. The bigger test may come when they send out their CV.
If Australia is serious about preparing workers for AI disruption, teaching older people new skills can only be part of the response. Employers have to be prepared to use those skills as well.
Losing a job at 60 also brings superannuation into the equation much sooner than many workers may have expected.
Under Australia’s super rules, people who cease an employment arrangement after turning 60 can generally satisfy a condition of release for the benefits accumulated up to that point.
For somebody who has been made redundant and cannot quickly find another job, that money may suddenly become very tempting.
The bills haven’t stopped because the salary has. There may still be mortgage repayments, rates, insurance, electricity, groceries and other everyday expenses to cover while the job search drags on.
Super can provide a lifeline, but using it years earlier than planned comes with a price. Money withdrawn today is no longer sitting in the fund earning investment returns for the years ahead.
For somebody who had intended to keep working until 67, the choice could be especially difficult. Do you burn through cash savings while searching for work? Take whatever job you can find, regardless of salary? Start drawing on super? Or accept that retirement has arrived seven years earlier than expected?
For some people, redundancy at 60 may mean retirement stops being a decision and becomes something forced upon them.
Take a hypothetical 60-year-old earning $90,000 with $350,000 in super.
They expect to work until 67 but are made redundant after their employer introduces AI across the business. They spend 12 months looking for work and eventually find another full-time position paying $65,000.
The financial loss goes well beyond one year without a salary.
For the following six years they are earning $25,000 less than expected, while their employer is making super contributions based on that lower salary. They may also lose the capacity to make extra contributions of their own, and all of that missing money loses the opportunity to earn investment returns before retirement.
If the worker has to draw on super during the year they are unemployed, the effect becomes greater again.
And that’s the relatively good outcome, because it assumes they find another full-time job.
For someone who doesn’t, or who moves between casual and part-time work for several years, the gap between the retirement they planned and the one they can afford could become substantial.
Businesses have good reasons to embrace AI. If the technology allows employees to work faster, reduces repetitive tasks and improves productivity, companies that ignore it may find themselves at a serious disadvantage.
Australia also has a national interest in productivity and in making sure its businesses can compete internationally.
None of that means the gains and losses will be shared evenly.
A company can become more productive after introducing AI at exactly the same time as an employee made redundant by that technology becomes less financially secure.
If significant numbers of workers are displaced, governments will have to consider whether unemployment benefits and conventional retraining programs are enough, particularly for people who have only a handful of working years remaining.
Should an experienced worker be helped to retrain before their job disappears rather than afterwards? Should employers introducing AI be encouraged to redeploy existing staff? Do mature workers need different employment assistance when technological change removes jobs late in their careers?
And how do we make sure someone who has spent 30 or 40 years building expertise isn’t simply written off because the technology changed when they were 60?
Nobody yet knows how many Australian jobs AI will ultimately replace, create or substantially change, and predictions about technological unemployment have been wrong plenty of times before.
Many people may find AI makes them better at their jobs rather than replacing them. New occupations will emerge and some existing skills may become more valuable, not less.
But averages and forecasts don’t offer much comfort to the individual worker whose position disappears.
Much of the discussion about AI and employment has understandably focused on young people: what they should study, which careers will survive and which skills they’ll need in the decades ahead.
Australia also needs to think about the people at the other end of their working lives.
They’re sitting in offices, shops, call centres and home workspaces across the country, preparing accounts, processing claims, dealing with customers, producing reports and doing thousands of other jobs that AI may change.
Many have spent decades building their careers and are finally within sight of retirement.
They may have seven years left in the workforce on paper. The question is whether the job they expected to do for those seven years will still be there.
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