For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here

This month, millions of young people will obtain their university diploma and will seek work in industries that have little use for their skills, consider them costly and consumable, and quickly remove their work in favor of artificial intelligence.

This is the disturbing conclusion of my conversations in recent months with economists, business leaders and young job seekers, many of whom have stressed a Emerging crisis for entry -level workers This seems to be supplied, at least in part, by rapid progress in AI capabilities.

You can see indices in economic data. Unemployment for recent colleges graduates has increased to an unusually high level of 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned That the employment situation for these workers had “deteriorated significantly”. Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies the labor markets, noted that unemployment for recent graduates was strongly concentrated in technical fields such as finance and IT, where AI has achieved faster gains.

“There are signs that entry -level positions are moved by artificial intelligence at higher rates,” wrote the company in a recent report.

But I am convinced that what appears in economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In an interview after interview, I hear that companies are progressing quickly to the automation of entry -level work, and that AI companies are underway to build “virtual workers” which can replace subordinate employees with a fraction of the cost. Business attitudes to automation also change – some companies have Encouraged managers To become “IA-STIF”, testing if a given task can be accomplished by AI before hiring a human to do so.

A technology leader recently told me that his business had stopped hiring everything below an L5 software engineer – an intermediate level title generally given to programmers with three to seven years of experience – because lower level tasks could now be carried out by AI coding tools. Another told me that his start-up now used a single data scientist to perform the types of tasks that required a team of 75 people in his previous business.