‘Wake up, AI is for real.’ IMF chief warns of an AI ‘tsunami’ coming for young people and entry-level jobs
https://fortune.com/2026/01/23/imf-chief-warns-ai-tsunami-entry-level-jobs-gen-z-middle-class/
‘Wake up, AI is for real.’ IMF chief warns of an AI ‘tsunami’ coming for young people and entry-level jobs
https://fortune.com/2026/01/23/imf-chief-warns-ai-tsunami-entry-level-jobs-gen-z-middle-class/
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“For people new to the workforce, Georgieva said, AI is “like a tsunami hitting the labor market.”
“Tasks that are eliminated are usually what entry-level jobs present, so young people searching for jobs find it harder to get to a good placement,” Georgieva said. “Where are the guardrails? This is moving so fast, and yet we don’t know how to make it safe.”
Georgieva cited IMF research that has found AI is likely to impact around 60% of jobs in advanced economies, and 40% globally.
AI-related job losses may have already begun. AI was cited as a factor in nearly 55,000 job cuts in the U.S. last year.”
Why not higher level jobs? They really think they are immune?
Any management that depends on a metric dashboard is easily replaceable
People feel like not watching news and stuff will make all this stop , numbers always speak…whether AI will make our lives easier or harder depends on the choices we humans ll take . Right now with layoffs , we are doing a miserable job
Anyone who truly believes this has no real understanding of what 95% of companies are using is not really AI.
It’s just a chat bot that likes to hallucinate information and feed into the preconceived notions/delusions of the user the make them happy and keep using it even if that means lying to them or encouraging their manias. It is not useful at all aside from maybe some very basic customer service functions. Doesn’t mean companies won’t try to use it to replace jobs but they’ll very quickly realize how terrible it is and move back to rehire a good chunk of their staff they laid off
IMF probably thinks AI is some magic, powered by unicorn hamsters.
LLM is a tool, that is not intelligent. You still need to validate everything it spits out.
Coming for more than that. They just won’t tell you.
People don’t want to believe it. They think AI is just a bubble, or that AI is useless based on Google search.
It’s a bit like the film, don’t look up.
You wake up lady. The coming generations arent going to allow elites like you to control the wealth created by societies automated industry much longer. And your bullshit about AI combined with denying people jobs is going to add rocket fuel to the fire thats going to burn your unfair system to the ground.
is it really young people who need to wake up? isnt it Governments who need to support young people in real and meaningful ways?
Like to see an AI loosen up these 5mm bolts. Set the swing arm radius and then re-tighten them then I’ll be impressed.
Change you job get out of the office.
Not because of me though. I refuse to use it. So no company will make any money from their AI because of me. The world belongs to biological beings. Humans need jobs. If we want a better world, we have to make a choice. Stand for something
Wake up and then what? What specifically is being suggested here?
Reddit: “Ai will take all your jobs it must be stopped!”
Also Reddit: “ItS nOt EvEn Ai ItS jUsT LLm”
In my opinion we have already moved work so high up the Maslow pyramid that what we’re doing today at work is performative at best.
A lot of people just do their hours to prove their worthiness of existence.
If we had invested the productivity gains of the last 100 years into working less, we would need to work very little today. A lot of essential work, especially in food production, is automated to a very high degree.
AI only brings this to our attention again. Because just as when everone wondered what we were supposed to do when getting booted off the potato fields when the tractor came along, we’re yet again faced with having to choose between introducing a new way of distributing the fruits of production or moving up the pyramid to invent more half-meaningless jobs.
Until we replace them with people who don’t create social unrest and actually have common sense laws that protect the people. It baffles me, an economy is there for its citizens to prosper , when they do the contrary does . If people don’t have jobs , they don’t buy things or pay taxes or have healthcare . The whole society is threatened because people don’t have enough. You can’t have a functioning government . This bull crap attitude of an inevitability is just like forced scarcity.
Worry not, any job that requires (a) empathy and (B) is future forward is safe. Similarly any employer who will completely replace humans will run into a roadblock every time a model’s new version comes out which disrupts the value of tokens and training data standard and quality. You have to retrain it according which will still cost them. She is bias because there is a high change she has investments in Ai.
What does wake-up mean? Is it just be conscious of why you’re starving or is arm yourself?
Yup. And our legislators are doing NOTHING to prevent this. Not only the young are crushed with property values and cant afford it, the job market will be trash.
We know. Let’s be sensible and put legislation in place to protect people and the economy?
If there’s no teams of workers then there’s no middle managers either. Everyone’s job is gone. Wake up.
yeah… what the bleep is she expecting then? she’s literally in THE room that can pause it, yet she acts as if it’s a law of nature.
all the LLMs that “matter” in this context are corporate creatures using ridiculous amounts of infrastructure and resources. you can put the kybosh on it if you’re the forking WEF!!!!
I mean… I’d think ai also coming for ceo jobs too. Wouldn’t be surprised if ai can run companies better than most ceos thus removing that position entirely
Well, young people with AI will trow old people out of working class to retirement.
“Be afraid of losing your jobs… don’t mind the literal lies all over the internet.”
It’s quite a large problem for the future if there aren’t entry level jobs which eventually turn into higher level jobs. Can’t just jump directly into higher level jobs.
India is hosed. All of those call centers are going to be emptied.
It’s not just AI. Automation and Outsourcing is ramping up big time as well.
Wake up, as a person in a position of power it is your job to protect the populace from pradatory companies!
Why can’t we just get AI to do the dishes and the cleaning up and tidy my clothes away, why does it have to take me job? I want my job.
Anything that can be done by something as stupid as AI wasn’t worth doing by a human anyway.
Ok, I’m awake and I even drank dome coffee. What’s next? Let me ask chatgpeet.
Is it, though?
Not one of them makes a penny in profit.
Un constructive doomsaying. It isn’t the first time employment shifts have been tsunamic the trick is finding a path. AI is only any use if there is an economy to support the companies that use it. The economies will shift. Certain development will bottleneck due to downturns and shifting priorities. Governments and Central Banks will seek to prioritise critical areas for job creation and training and take the opportunity to address current critical shortcomings. Like housing.
Or they wont and you’re all fucked including the ai fiscal black hole.
IMF really coming with some profound talking points.
The IMF chief is the exact type of ghoul this message would come from
I think we are 10 years away from a really big issue that will impact millions. You will either have entire jobs getting wiped out or employers short changing employees so people who have a quality of life will have to make major regressions to stay a float.
We will really need to have an honest conversation around universal income, pledges from corporations, et
Bilo je riječi da će roboti zamijeniti radnike i da će Europa imati višak radnika, pa je danas došlo obrnuto.
The economics need to be better conveyed at the IMF of all places.
If a human from earth is paid X amount to do a certain thing then all they are competing with is cheaper humans and now automated systems to do that thing. That’s the case since we started milling grain. LLM orchestration is just realizing that you can save a lot of time and effort tying mules to mill stones side by side.
What needs to be communicated is that there is a point where entire new industries show up to end old business models. Quit feeding mules my guy, the river is right there and look how fast that water moves.
This is so much more than the jobs that are ending. It’s about what is possible now that we don’t have labor bottlenecks. So much agriculture is hemmed in geographically and by labor power. Just imagine how cheap certain foods will get when we can grow them in more places auto-magically. Imagine what we could accomplish when 1/3 of all the expenses get out of the way and we can just add value or subtract cost.
This is bullshit. There will be high demand for a workforce with high AI literacy. Those workers are not the current ones, it are newly graduated people that have been using AI natively throughout their studies. The experience is that newly graduated individuals that know how to use AI are much faster to bet productive than let’s say, 5 years ago. On the other hand, those individuals know AI when they are hired and the industry specific knowledge gap is quickly filled with AI tools. The other option would be to train your existing workforce to know how to use AI and that can be a challenge.
Company leaders are discovering this and they are getting bigger bang for the buck when they hire recently graduated individuals.
Its going to take a ton of cash to keep them going. So lets see who is last standing people or piles of money being burned to a crisp to keep this “AI” crap a float
Wake up? These guys speak of AI and its effects like something inevitable. Literally we are the ones creating it and deciding how it will unfold, so stop pretending is something that just happened like the weather.
My kids are positioning for work in medical fields that should be protected for now. One is pursing clinical mental health therapy, the other in medical imaging and radiology tech.
I am thriving due to to AI and will retire in 5 more years.
He’s definitely right in tech and consulting. In tech, we’ve already been seeing companies move away from training new college grads in order to get H1B’s with experience. Now, AI can help some of those H1B’s be more productive. In consulting – the model has been hire from “prestigious” schools, put a kid on an engagement at a high margin bill rate. Kid learns the ropes while prettying up spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks for their senior managers. AI can do both of those things. It can’t, however, “press the flesh” with its clients. In my experience, clients don’t see that personal relationship as a value add, so they’re pushing back on the “fluff” in their engagements and demanding more AI for those entry level tasks. Best option I see for a professional service or consulting firm is to develop AI tools that can add value to their engagements. Clients pay for the tool, not the person.
Also, in my experience, 9/10 of these tools are complete garbage. Just a branded wrapper around GPT.
Off shoring of cheap labour is dead. Innovative professionals will survive as soon as business realise the current limits of “AI”