There Is Now Clearer Evidence AI Is Wrecking Young Americans’ Job Prospects

Artificial intelligence is profoundly limiting some young Americans’ employment prospects, new research shows.

Young workers are getting hit in fields where generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT can most easily automate tasks done by humans, such as software development, according to a paper released Tuesday by three Stanford University economists. They crunched anonymized data on millions of employees at tens of thousands of firms, including detailed information on workers’ ages and jobs, making this one of clearest indicators yet of AI’s disruptive impact.

“There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” said Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who conducted the research with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.

That’s the plan – that was always the plan, as any futurist should know. First the low-skilled, then everyone else as it improves. It is our destiny to be free from wage-slavery. Labor isn’t what defines humans. Creativity and socializing is what defines us. Accelerate!

This sounds like a negative, but the truth is not every generation has an easy start to their careers, and everyone, absolutely everyone, will experience hardships and setbacks in their careers. We will all experience challenges in our career, and they can happen at the start, or any time thereafter.

If this doomy claim that AI will take jobs turns out to be true, people will have to embrace hustle, will have to get creative. They will have to remember that getting a job isn’t the only career one can have. They will have to start companies or new ventures. The AI companies don’t want any smaller firms starting up in the AI world right now, which is why they are trying to occupy all the mindshare and communicate “AI is expensive and only huge companies can do it”. They want all the revenue and want to absorb all the innovation, rather than seeing more companies start up and innovate. Are you going to let them shut you out all because they scared traditional employers into slowing recruitment? IBM fired 8000 people, believing it could replace them with AI; it’s busy trying to rehire a lot of those people right now because it messed up.

Companies will also have to make some tough decisions: would they rather reduce their talent and save money, or keep that talent and do more than ever? If you need fewer customer service people, do you let those people go or put them through sales training and use employees who know your products better than external hires, put them to work in sales, or customer retention, or marketing? How will companies ensure a future for themselves if they don’t keep pools of employees earlier in their careers who learn the corporate ropes? Companies will not be able to ignore these questions, nor will they be able to only go for the lowest-cost answers, they will be forced to confront their future and any company that doesn’t hire young people will eventually experience a generational collapse in labour force. We still have the Baby Boomer retirement underway, right now, too, they occupy the top jobs and that means everyone will move up.

Do the fundamentals: learn everything you can, become a specialist, hustle hard, always be respectful to hiring people, and always look for pains you experience as a customer, or passions you have and how they might turn into a business. Your best career might be the one you start up for yourself.