The AI Job Apocalypse May Already Be Hurting Some New Graduates

Millions of young people in the United States will graduate from college soon and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence (AI).

- Kevin Roose

That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives, and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.

You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates in the US has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has warned that the employment situation for these people has "deteriorated noticeably."

Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains.

"There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a report.

But I am convinced that what is showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg.

In interview after interview, I am hearing that firms are making rapid progress towards automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost.

Corporate attitudes towards automation are also changing—some firms are encouraging managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human for it.

One tech executive recently told me his firm had stopped hiring for positions below an L5 software engineer—a mid-level title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience—because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools.

Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company.

Anecdotes like these do not add up to mass joblessness, of course.