Some older workers are choosing to retire rather than wrangle with artificial intelligence.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The share of older workers in the U.S. is on the decline. About 37% of people age 55 and above are now active in the labor force. About a decade ago, it was around 40%. The pandemic chased some older workers out. Others can simply afford to retire. If the golf course beckons and you have the money, why not?

Still another factor that's causing some to exit, the emergence of artificial intelligence in

the workplace. Learning how to interact with it as a tool, maybe even a colleague, seems like a

headache to some. So they're choosing retirement instead. Lauren Weber with the Wall Street

Journal has been reporting on this.

She told me about one 68-year-old man who's decided to opt out.

So he started his career as a graphic designer and ended up as a content strategist

working for a hospital system.

And, you know, he said, I've been through desktop publishing.

I've been through the arrival of

the internet and having to learn how to do online publishing. He was like, I just don't want to go

through another one of these technological changes. And he's not shunning AI. He said he's using it to

learn Spanish. He just wants to use it for himself. He doesn't want to have to learn

this for an employer or for someone else. So it's not necessarily that older workers feel they

can't master these tools or even don't want to master these tools. It's partly that, you know,

you've been in the workforce for decades. And it's like, I want to basically do things for myself right now.

There is something kind of poignant about institutional knowledge and intelligence being

pushed out by artificial intelligence. And it makes me wonder, what could companies and younger

workers be losing here? AI can only capture what is online.

What you lose is anything that is not captureable by a computer or by an algorithmic model.

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