Is the AI Job Apocalypse Already Here for Some Recent Grads? (msn.com)
- Reference: 0177895253
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/01/2114234/is-the-ai-job-apocalypse-already-here-for-some-recent-grads
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/for-some-recent-graduates-the-ai-job-apocalypse-may-already-be-here/ar-AA1FOYJF
> 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.
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> You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "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 recent report.
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> But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward 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 toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to [2]become "AI-first ," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel 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 startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...
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> "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/for-some-recent-graduates-the-ai-job-apocalypse-may-already-be-here/ar-AA1FOYJF
[2] https://thenewstack.io/duolingo-grapples-with-its-ai-first-promise-before-angry-social-mob/
What happens with 20-30% unemployment (Score:3)
You want to be like South Africa, with 20 percent or higher unemployment for two decades? With 18-35 seeing nearly 40% unemployment rates in the last few years. A huge slice of the population is occupied every day searching for money in an economy that has little to spare. Day labor and temporary employment is a decades long occupation for people.
With the people who do have jobs always feeling like they are under constant risk of losing them, and have little power to negotiate for higher pay or better working conditions. Unskilled labor is incredibly cheap there, but also unreliable. This compounds unemployment with slowed economic growth so there is less to pass around in an increasing population.
I predict it will end when there is enough social upheaval to displace the power base in their system. This is almost always violent, and I suspect that will be the case for South Africa. And also likely the case if the US finds itself in a similar levels of unemployment during a drawn out recession. Having the government and institutions collapse for a nuclear-armed power is an incredibly dangerous scenario for the world, and not one we should be aiming to repeat.
Re: (Score:3)
South Africa's problems have nothing to do with AI. The country is rife with corruption. And this is the underlying cause in nearly every country where there are very high unemployment rates. It's not technology or automation, but government interference or corruption. That pattern is not likely to change with AI, this is not the first round of automation seen in the developed world, not by a long shot.
Instability is the common thread (Score:2)
I don't think it matters a whole lot what causes massive unemployment. Corruption, capitalism, climate change, civil war, etc.
The end result; is if you have massive unemployment and a cycle that isn't being broken, you will face social strife and political upheaval.
Government interference - is kind of the point of having a government in the first place. Not having a functioning government and having unregulated industry lands you in a similar predicament: people struggling and stuck, with little incentive t
Re: (Score:2)
You missed my point entirely. My point was that automation doesn't cause unemployment, corrupt governments do that. We have automated away nearly every job that existed 200 years ago, and yet developed countries with the highest levels of automation, with low corruption, have plenty of work for people to do.
Governments should interfere with unscrupulous businesses. It's when governments get in bed with them, that people suffer.
You correctly call the AI apologists, "hypemasters." That's exactly what it is, h
The militarized police (Score:2)
Beats the fuck out of them and we let them do it because we get scared of crime. That's just what happens..
Democracy at that point can't save you because by the time it gets that bad the ruling elite has all but eliminated democracy.
This is why the billionaires and the ruling class have stepped up their attacks on democracy. It's because they know damn well the ruling class and elite won't be able to hold on to their unlimited power money and privilege when unemployment is pushing 30%.
So before
Re: (Score:1)
> The right wing is inherently better at violence because they're better at command structures and you need a strong command structure to do effective violence, a command structure you aren't going to get rid of when the shooting stops. We should defund abolish and get rid off all police and give the funds to us the people and very decent UBI for everybody.
> Democrats don't have a top-down command structure the way to Republicans do where the billionaires just step in and put their foot down and everybody gets in line. Add to that the way hierarchies impose various command structures and you have a large group of people highly vulnerable to stochastic terrorism.
> Without biblical literalism the authority of the command structure is fundamentally undermined. They tried to do it to the furries and the anime nerds but they got kicked to the curb hard. Right wing extremists are well organized and well funded and they have a strong command structure.
> That desire to have a command structure that makes you feel like everything's under control. And to have people above you telling you what to do and then people below you that you get to tell what to do. If any of them ever get to uppity the Republican party has a strong command structure and will shut them down. With command structures. These militias do. If that's single bank robber was part of a much wider Network of criminal organizations that it might be worth having three FBI agents hanging out with them.
> They're also authoritarian so they neatly fall into command structures making it easy to form small armies of them to commit acts of violence. The violent ones on the right are actually dangerous. They organize into a command structure and have the backing of a major political party.
> Red States don't need to bust Unions because they have other mechanisms to control the population. In Utah they've got the Mormon church, which gives them a pretty big command structure to keep the state right wing and voting Red. Other states use the drug war & systemic racism to disenfranchise voters.
> I mean there's solid evidence that Republican voter suppression prevented 7 million Americans from voting. That's a wide enough margin by far to have given Haris the win. If the Democrats had any backbone they'd be doing something about it right now but instead the dumbasses think they can get concessions out of the Republicans during budget negotiations.
> You need to put climate change aside right now and focus on voting rights. We've got pretty good data that clearly indicates 7 million Americans were prevented from voting in 2024. About half of those couldn't vote because of things like Jim Crow style ballot challenges, voter purges and just plain making it difficult bordering on impossible to register to vote. The other half was your classic election day shenanigans like multi-hour wait times, poll watchers and bomb threats. If you're on the left wing and you have an issue that keeps you there what you need to be focusing on right now is voting rights. Nothing else matters.
> You will note that there is not left wing equivalent of Ngo. That's because when you provide the right wing their first response is to pull guns & start shooting. And that's because the right wing has a violent command structure vs the left's occasional over testosteroned frat boy. A militia has a command structure, and liberalism is the opposite of a command structurebecause the right wing is inherently better at violence because they're better at command structures and you need a strong command structure to do effective violence, a command structure you aren't going to get rid of when the shooting stops.
> Democrats don't have a top-down command structure the way to Republicans do where the billionaires just step in and put their foot down and everybody gets in line. Add to that the way hierarchies impose various command structures and you have a large group of people highly vulnerable to stochastic terrorism.
> Without biblical literalism the authority of the command structure is fundamentally undermined. They tried to do it to the furries and the anime nerds but they got kicked to the curb hard. Right wing extremists are well organized and well funded and they have a strong command structure.
> That desire to have a command structure that makes you feel like everything's under control. And to have people above you telling you what to do and then people below you that you get to tell what to do. If any of them ever get to uppity the Republican party has a strong command structure and will shut them down. With command structures. These militias do. If that's single bank robber was part of a much wider Network of criminal organizations that it might be worth having three FBI agents hanging out with them.
> They're also authoritarian so they neatly fall into command structures making it easy to form small armies of them to commit acts of violence. The violent ones on the right are actually dangerous. They organize into a command structure and have the backing of a major political party.
> Red States don't need to bust Unions because they have other mechanisms to control the population. In Utah they've got the Mormon church, which gives them a pretty big command structure to keep the state right wing and voting Red. Other states use the drug war & systemic racism to disenfranchise voters.
> I mean there's solid evidence that Republican voter suppression prevented 7 million Americans from voting. That's a wide enough margin by far to have given Haris the win. If the Democrats had any backbone they'd be doing something about it right now but instead the dumbasses think they can get concessions out of the Republicans during budget negotiations.
> You need to put climate change aside right now and focus on voting rights. We've got pretty good data that clearly indicates 7 million Americans were prevented from voting in 2024. About half of those couldn't vote because of things like Jim Crow style ballot challenges, voter purges and just plain making it difficult bordering on impossible to register to vote. The other half was your classic election day shenanigans like multi-hour wait times, poll watchers and bomb threats. If you're on the left wing and you have an issue that keeps you there what you need to be focusing on right now is voting rights. Nothing else matters.
> You will note that there is not left wing equivalent of Ngo. That's because when you provide the right wing their first response is to pull guns & start shooting. And that's because the right wing has a violent command structure vs the left's occasional over testosteroned frat boy. A militia has a command structure, and liberalism is the opposite of a command structure
> --
> www.fark.com/politics
That may be the dumbest pile of shit ever posted on this site.
Re: (Score:3)
You already are at that level. 1 in 7 US males are effectively ineligible for work because of criminal records (because they make anything a criminal offence now). Millions see no point and drop out of college and have nothing to show for it. No chance to ever buy a house. There must be a huge society running in parallel with "society" that is never talked about.
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With that kind of unemployment political system will produce populists that will make Trump look old-fashioned moderate.
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We'll never have that high of unemployment rate. It's just not possible. South Africa has less capital and a large uneducated population with questionable work ethic.
Headlines in 2030... (Score:2)
One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience
2030...."Technology sector in crisis due to a shortage of skilled and experienced programmers."
Re: (Score:2)
Both the current headline, and your proposed 2030 headline, are overblown. Automation is hard, even with AI. Wendy's couldn't get their AI drive through bots to work right, they called of their experiment because it failed so spectacularly. The road to AI automation will be long and winding, not fast and catastrophic.
AI is not a panacea (Score:1)
It's "artificial" intelligence. And it's going to lie to you. It is only as good as what it is trained on, and has shown some disturbing tendencies toward fabrication. "These can be tuned out," I hear you say. Perhaps. But when every company is using AI, how do they differentiate themselves, and will the adjustment of their AI tool inject faults? More worrying to the corporate leadership, I suspect, is the answer to the question, "how do we know our AI isn't lying to us?"
Is there an effect? (Score:3)
Does the 5.8% unemployment rate for new college graduates indicate anything about AI's effect on entry-level jobs? The 5.8% compares to around 4-5% historically in the good times and more than 5.8% in the bad times (2007, 2013). Furthermore, going from 4% to 5.8% sounds significant, but looking at the complementary employment rate, dropping from 96% to 94.2% doesn't seem like a paradigm shift.
Furthermore, correlation is not the same as causation. Perhaps the single-biggest economic factor right now is not AI and not even tariffs but the wind-down from the stimulus and pandemic-based over-hiring from the last few years. If AI never happened, the layoffs resulting from the over-hiring would have caused new college graduates to struggle to find jobs when competing against the recently laid-off people.
Maybe AI is replacing workers in a significant way. There are anecdotal stories, but the stats do not necessarily show this yet.
Talent is real (Score:2)
It takes a special kind of mind to be good at writing code and not all can do it. Unfortunately, programming has gotten a reputation for high salaries and lots of people from pundits to politicians promote the idea that everyone should learn to code. This results in a tsunami of students of varying ability taking CS courses. Some are talented, some not. Many of the not-so-talented students find a way to graduate and are surprised that they can't find work.
Meanwhile, the talented will master the AI tools and
If AI is replacing programmers (Score:2)
Then why does anyone need Microsoft, Google, Autodesk, Adobe? Just use AI to code replacement tools. I leave Apple off the list because they're a hardware/software integrated company.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure running a search engine requires being a hardware software integration company (or even hosting mail).
Autodesk and Adobe I can see suffering. I would not personally bet on Adobe growing over the next 10 years.
Between Canva, AI image tools, and low end image touch up software, I would not want to be Adobe. They're getting to the point where they're outside of the reach or even desire of hobbyists while k-12 is using Canva in the curriculum.
I'm not sure if there's anything that works as a high
Magic number, 30% working 0 hours (Score:2)
> ... rapidly phasing-out their jobs ...
Countries with a greed complex (third-world, USA) will find the 'your fault you're poor' meme is increasingly unpopular. They will, by definition, refuse to transition to a socialist/UBI economy that taxes profit proportionately (one rate for all rich people). The result will be millions of poor people, very angry at the few rich people. In the case of the USA, with billionaires already lining-up to steal the welfare that (already exists and) most people depend upon, and other treasury funds, the collapse
TRADE SCHOOLS! (Score:1)
Yeah, robotics well take over production bla bla bla. I still see a lot of billboards when I pass construction, industrial places that say signing bonuses, and on and on. I never went to a four year college. I opted for a trade school. Never been unemployed. You just get your hands dirty, that's all.
is Molly Kinder an AI? (Score:2)
' "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't goo
Short term gain, long term pain (Score:2)
This may work in the short term as we have an existing pool of experienced programmers that can take on higher roles and evaluate the code put out by these AI. Over time however those people will dwindle and if we don't have the entry level jobs training up the next generation of experienced programmers then this could lead to a conundrum.
Will we be so accustomed to AI slop by then that we just accept the inefficient / bloated / potentially error prone in interesting ways code it produces as good quality an
Now for the trickle down... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many that would have been entry level keyboard twiddlers will now be competing for jobs in the retail, service, and other blue collar sectors. This will push down wages and disenfranchise people that were capable of and happy doing those jobs as managers snap up the better educated people willing to do anything to pay their bills.
Capitalism won.
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:2)
You know dude...if some of those keyboard twiddlers start pushing buttons on CNC machines in between moving and adjusting fixtures...I can't say anyone will be worse off.
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:2)
Being a machinist takes a lot of training, but itâ(TM)s a good job. Being a paid monkey who loads billets in a machine and pushes the buttons heâ(TM)s told isnâ(TM)t being a machinist, and isnâ(TM)t really a better job than pushing buttons on a computer keyboard.
Re: (Score:3)
Yea, but a billet monkey that can stop a bad job quickly is worth a bit.
Be welder. Better hurry up.
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That's one of the jobs they will move in on, 3D printing services, anything computer controlled fabrication will have the lower 40% of tech grads lining up to to work the night shifts.
Average new home size will be a leading indicator (Score:2)
Conjectures:
- Loss of entry level earnings will be similar to how a stubbornly high unemployment or underemployment rate causes a large spike in crime
- Average new home sizes will decline year after year for decades due to lifetime earnings loss and the rise in women who never have a child of their own
- The crisis unspoken will be the loss of future sales and income tax payments through people earning much less in inflation adjusted terms over their working life
- The real adjusted earnings for 2025 college/
Re: (Score:1)
And when everyone is working for low wages or unemployed (because they were replaced by AI) who is going to buy your products?
Re: (Score:2)
> And when everyone is working for low wages or unemployed (because they were replaced by AI) who is going to buy your products?
I think I may have answered your question [1]here [slashdot.org]
[1] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23707249&cid=65420539#comments
Re: (Score:2)
If you are still making those products, you lost. Try harder.
Re: (Score:3)
> Capitalism won.
Unrestrained and unchecked capitalism cheated and "won". Decades of governments which allowed corporations to externalize costs, and to get away with crimes which sometimes included literal murder, handed them the victory.
We've been owned because we didn't hold elected officials sufficiently accountable, and didn't break out the torches, pitchforks, and defenestrations soon enough and often enough. Now it's probably too late to do that.
They've gaslit and propagandized us until we're too busy trying to tear
Re: (Score:3)
It's not too late, but it won't work while half of us think we deserve it.
Re: (Score:3)
I think a more accurate statement would be - "half of us think the other half deserves it".
Re: (Score:3)
A story old as time. Government (clown)officials get voted for promises while being in the pockets of their oligarch owners. It has been happening since the ancient greek days and the birth of democracy.
It's how democracies die and are reborn, better and cleaner. We're just the un/lucky few who were born at the right time to enjoy the show of it.
The government didn't allow that (Score:3, Insightful)
Billionaires bought off the government and moral panics meant voters let them do it. While half of us were freaking out about trans girls or heavy metal music or gay marriage or whatever fucking nonsense there was.
But notice how you just can't help but try and blame government. That's on purpose. Billionaires have spent a lot of money making you hostile to the concept of government because you will avoid using government to protect yourself and your community and family because in the words of their shi
Re: (Score:1)
Speaking of sacred cows don't forget the people freaking out about soggy knees, the end of the world coming tomorrow, consensual pussy grabbing and racist dog whistles while voting for the politicians who were the other side of the coin.
Are random stupid trolls (Score:2)
Worth losing your house for?
Look you're on this website so you're going to be an old fart. And you probably bought a house before they got expensive.
Like most old farts you are probably counting on the fact that you own a house to save you.
If you don't already need pills to live give it a few years, you will.
As the price of those pills skyrocket because, well, you need them to live, you will eventually mortgage your house to afford them and eventually you won't be able to pay that mortgage.
Re: (Score:1)
Quite the prophecy you've laid out there. Let me give you one that is a little more realistic, albeit a personal example that does not apply to others.
We JUST bought a house, with no money down, for $365K. Is that considered expensive? We have not sold our old one yet (we still have not moved), but we bought it for $135K in 2013. We will list it for $270K later this summer. Is that expensive?
Yes, at age 54, I take pills. Not sure if they are "to live" or not. Maybe they are. But they're not too expensive,
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:2, Troll)
I assume by "unrestrained and unchecked" you're referring to how the left has put so many regulations, restrictions, and minimum wage increases in place over the decades that it made companies first offshore and then (when that still wasn't enough) invent AI for the purpose of being able to stay in business.
Trickle up (Score:2)
People don't just roll over and die when their jobs are taken away.
I was pretty comfortable in easy low paying work for many years. The combination of getting stuck with the kid and inflation eating away and never increasing pay meant that I was forced to move up in the world whether I wanted to or not.
The end result is I had to throw my hat in the ring to compete with jobs that paid pretty well, the kind of jobs most people here have.
This meant you had an additional person to compete with for e
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think that its won yet. The problem needs to become sufficiently serious/painful before society will get serious about a solution. This is why the world is so slow to tackle climate change.
UBIs are being tested in several of the more liberal democracies around the world, and some are showing some successes. Not the silver bullet to overthrow capitalism yet, but social revolution takes time.
I have three kids, all post grads in various technology fields. None of them have jobs in their field o