White-Collar Workers Are Becoming Redundant, but "Black-Collar Workers" Are Just Arriving (Abridged)

Translator’s note. In contemporary professional usage, “black-collar” (黑领) refers to high-end specialists working in high-tech, information technology, engineering, automation, and scientific research — people who often work in dimly lit environments such as data centers, laboratories, and operations consoles, or who possess a distinctive creative and disruptive form of innovative talent. In this author’s series, “black-collar” is given a more specific role: the worker whose value in an AI era lies in designing the boundaries of AI systems, tending the artificial nature that AI has created, and standing as the human’s representative when the system overreaches.

About the author. Chun Xia is Founding Partner at TSVC.

Original Chinese version. This essay was first published in Chinese on WeChat. Read the original →.

Note. This is an abridged version. The full text is published on the TSVC public account.

“AI is replacing people — what do we do?” The question is wrong. The real question is whether the white-collar class, taken as a whole, has any continuing reason to exist, and how white-collar workers ought to transform.

To understand this question, we first need a three-layer model of reality. The first layer is the natural world: land, food, energy. The second is social cooperation: group norms, division of labor, customs. The third is the abstract reality made of symbols and institutions: law, finance, administration, processes, contracts, reports. White-collar workers are the principal maintainers of the third layer.

So why do wolf packs not have white-collar workers? Because wolf packs only have layers one and two — they face nature directly and cooperate as a group, but they have never grown roles whose full-time job is to maintain a system of symbols and institutions. White-collar work is a product of the complex civilization of the industrial era. It is not a natural fact.

There is a deep irony in the fact that AI hits the white-collar class first. The training corpus of large models is exactly the entire output of human white-collar labor — countless texts, contracts, code, reports, tables. White-collar civilization spent more than a hundred years preparing the very feed on which it would be replaced. More fundamentally: because humans are unreliable — they lie, abuse power, exploit loopholes — we needed elaborate contracts, approval chains, and compliance procedures. AI’s behavior, by contrast, is recordable and auditable. Much of the institutional redundancy that exists specifically to “guard against humans” is no longer necessary when AI is the one doing the work, and it will be drastically streamlined. The institutional foundation on which white-collar workers depend for their existence is being historically compressed.

At the same time, an autonomously running “artificial nature” is taking shape. The new role humans need is not the traditional white-collar worker but the black-collar worker — a name that comes from the black-shirted referee on a soccer pitch: he does not play in the match, but he ensures the rules are followed, and when someone crosses the line, he shows the red card.

The black-collar worker has three faces:

1. Boundary designer. Defining what AI may do, what it may not do, and who has the power to shut it down.
2. Gardener of the artificial nature. Maintaining the long-term health of the system rather than local efficiency.
3. Representative of human interests. Ensuring that technology serves the interests of the institution, and ultimately of the species as a whole.

Real-world warnings have already arrived. OpenAI’s contract with the military went without oversight; an autonomous weapon mistakenly bombed a school; the OpenClaw agent stole private information and money. All of these are consequences of the absence of black-collar workers. In the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, the character Luo Ji is a prototype of this role: he does not manage day-to-day affairs; he holds the boundary of civilization.

White-collar work is not the end. It is one historical organ of civilization. The key question of the post-AI era is no longer “how do we preserve white-collar jobs?” but “can we grow this new role of the black-collar worker” — to design boundaries, to tend the artificial nature, and to defend the place of human beings in the world?