AI Is Crushing Young Workers' Employment Prospects, Stanford Study Finds
- Reference: 0178876724
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/08/26/125251/ai-is-crushing-young-workers-employment-prospects-stanford-study-finds
- Source link:
The [1]study [PDF] , based on ADP payroll data covering tens of thousands of firms, found the steepest drops in occupations where AI automates tasks rather than augments human capabilities. Among software developers aged 22-25, employment fell nearly 20% from its late 2022 peak.
Workers in less AI-exposed fields like nursing saw employment growth across all age groups. The research controlled for firm-level effects and other economic factors, isolating AI's impact from broader trends like interest rate changes and pandemic-era hiring patterns.
[1] https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf
Incorrect (Score:4, Insightful)
IT hiring manager here. No, it's them being unable to type, spell, and wanting a promotion on day 1 with no experience while spouting off socialist bullshit in the office. That's why we're not hiring them. We mostly use AI to generate pictures of cats running fiber lines though.
Re: (Score:1)
> while spouting off socialist bullshit in the office. That's why we're not hiring them.
What do you mean by that? Them trying to unionize, or them going straight for the jugular of the great capitalist society with a hammer and a sickle? Be specific, otherwise it sounds like you're full of shit.
On topic - as people have said above, this is just a money grab, artificial pressure to lower wage expectations.
Re: Incorrect (Score:2)
Well you're awfully triggered by that. Either way, that's not something he needs to get into their heads over, as some of them, like you, misuse words. If they're missing a lot of other soft skills, that's a safe conclusion to reach, and going any further is simply a waste of time.
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That's interesting. For as long as I've been in the industry, programmers and IT people have tended to be libertarian, not socialist, though the GPL group has always had that scent of communism.
Going to pay the price (Score:5, Interesting)
There are absolutely areas of employment that we are going to have big shortages in several years down the road because of this.
My wife and I both work in Radiology, and most all hospitals are having some trouble finding radiologists to read images. The cause? About 8-10 years ago it was all over the news that AI was reading medical images and doing a better job than radiologists. That caused a non-trivial percentage of medical students to choose some other specialization, believing that AI would replace enough radiologists that they wouldn't find work.
Well, that didn't come to pass. Sure, AI is being used in some small way, mainly to flag things and bring specific areas of an image to a doctor's attention, but at this point it hasn't actually improved their workflow or the speed in which they can read images. So now we're paying the price with a shortage in radiologists.
Now apply that scenario to almost every professional career you can think of, and imagine the shortages we're going to have 8-10 years down the line when AI didn't live up to the hype in myriad careers and fields. My prediction is trade careers (construction, plumbing, electrical, etc) are going to reach an all-time high (which is actually needed, so that's a good thing) as people pick career paths that can't be touched by AI.
Re:Going to pay the price (Score:4, Insightful)
The people that cause these problems don't care that they exist, they're someone else's problem. However, these people control government, that's the point. Yes, these problems are going to grow, the rich profit from it now and will profit from it later. It's just another two Santas.
The country is doomed if its people cannot take power back from the wealthy. No one is asking for this AI bullshit, except for the rich.
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Isn't there a shortage of all medical specialists and non-specialists? Despite an aging population there was no effort to increase staffing since that would mean increasing the payroll. What idiot would do that when you can reduce services and raise prices.
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> trade careers (construction, plumbing, electrical, etc) are going to reach an all-time high
Unfortunately those trades pay only about $35/hr in the USA. And in fact we are currently in a housing slump, the builders are laying trades people off in droves.
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Only? ONLY?!?
That's fucking $70K/year!!! That's a nice god damned wage!
A problem that might kill itself (Score:2)
Short term, AI will be overvalued by managers and will bring a lot of in house work back as things mess up. See the initial push for outsourcing... we got paid a lot to clean up other peoples code until the standards of business got worked out.
Long term there will be a floor / ceiling issue. The floor for writing basic code will be lowered, and the ceiling for reviewing the code will be higher. Vibe coding doesn't exactly give you experience in memory management that you might need to make sure there aren't
This'll be temporary (Score:1)
Businesses will find other ways to utilize the people. But it'll take time for the resorting and adjusting to happen.
Re:This'll be temporary (Score:4, Informative)
Or it'll be temporary when they actually find out AI is not at all what they expected and they need to rehire for the same jobs all over again.
Test first I would've thought was the way to go.
It reminds me of the dump-ass actions of big contract software deployments completely writing off the older system the moment the new one is supposedly live ... Only to find out the new system is not just buggy as all hell but also lacks many needed features. And it takes years and a massive overspend to rectify. All the while refusing to resurrect the old system.
What happens when employees need to be replace. (Score:3)
What happens when mid-level employees are needed, and there are none in the pipeline because AI took their jobs? AI depends on good data for training. What happens when there is no good data and AI starts to hallucinate?
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> What happens when mid-level employees are needed, and there are none in the pipeline because AI took their jobs? AI depends on good data for training. What happens when there is no good data and AI starts to hallucinate?
That is easy. Look at what happens when countries defund the education system. Everything is fine in the short term, then it gets worse, and finally you end up with a populace voting someone like Trump into power. Except in this case it will be Cyberdyne systems.
Enlist (Score:2)
We are going to be sending our armed forces into every corner of the globe. And since AI weaponry has been deemed unethical, we will be needing grunts to pull triggers.
AI could replace 100% of the WF (Score:2)
As long as it replaces a segment of the WF slowly, most people will do nothing.
Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of over 50s here who are going to find that they are completely unemployable. Uber these days pays below minimum wage.
I guess we can all just go be plumbers right? Just like learn to code. Anyone here old enough to remember when biotech was what we were all going to be doing after the factories started automating?
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Eh, the buggy whip makers went to work for Ford.
There will be more productive activity to be done so long as there are people willing to work. Once wants and needs are met by AI, people will get sick of them and want and need things that can't be made by AI. It's human nature - we always want what we can't have.
Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age predicted this but with nanotech. All goods became commodities when the nanotech replicators became ubiquitous, destroying the need for labor to produce them - what b
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> Eh, the buggy whip makers went to work for Ford.
So, are you saying that software developers are all going to go work for OpenAI? *facepalm*
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"Eh, the buggy whip makers went to work for Ford."
Who are today's buggy whip makers? And who are they going to go work for?
"There will be more productive activity to be done so long as there are people willing to work."
Victim blaming. What will this productive activity be?
"There's certainly going to be some pain as we transition more productive workload over to AI (or more accurately, perform existing workload much more efficiently using AI), but it will shake out. People will find productive work."
They c
Re: (Score:2)
I need someone to mow my yard. That would be productive activity for someone to do.
It takes about an hour to mow my yard. I'll supply the mower. Someone just needs to show up and mow it.
I'm guessing there are lots of such jobs available.
Re: (Score:2)
> Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age predicted this but with nanotech. All goods became commodities when the nanotech replicators became ubiquitous, destroying the need for labor to produce them
Thing is current AI today and in the next 30-40 years isn't going to solve resource scarcity like nanotech would. If anything it's costing us resources.
Thought terminating cliche (Score:3)
Buggy whip is a thought terminating cliche. It's something you use so you don't have to think about what happens.
The two are not remotely alike because people who stopped making buggy whips could go make cars.
In this case everything's getting automated. There are just fewer jobs.
This has happened before when automation outpaced job creation. In particular during the second industrial revolution leading up to world war I and II.
It is not a coincidence that we had widespread technological unem
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Don't forget about the other group: people who refuse to work and think everything should be free.
Good job proving my point (Score:2)
That kind of nasty little comment is why our species will soon be at war with nukes.
I'm sure a big brained boy like you though will be just fine. Nothing bad ever happens in your life ever. You are certainly not going to spend the final years of your life homeless after a billionaire swindles you out of your property. Not a big brain boy like you... And you certainly wouldn't continuously repeat a right-wing talking point from the 1980s for your entire adult life. Again big brain boy.
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The goal here isnt to replace jobs, its to suppress wages.
The jobs are still there, go look at any job board. The fact is, they want these articles out there to make people think their job is under pressure, not needed, etc. But one only need look at job boards to find it false.
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Correct. And the rich don't care where the work comes from so long as it's free to them.
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That has been going on for a while. It used to be fine to get a job and work at it until retirement, but that time has been over for a while now and no connection to AI. Automation was always going to do that.
Personally, I am lucky. IT Security experts, and in particular lecturers, with a lot of experience are in high demand and that demand for good IT security people will only increase as regulation gets stricter and the threat-landscape gets more nasty. But a lot of people are screwed and that is not good
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Hehe, someone to pipe up the heat-exchangers on all those new server farms.
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Companies will find that because they replaced all the younger workers with AI, there aren't enough experienced ones. Unless AI dramatically improves, it's going to be a repeat of what happened with on-the-job training. Everyone needs a degree now because companies decided they didn't want to train them.
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It isn't really any different than the tech crash in the early 2000s. There were NO JOBS for entry level software people and they idea was "oh well we're going to outsource everything to India anyway." Well that didn't quite happen and since then there's a gap. Many of we grey haired guys will soon just stop working - retirement or death - and then what? It's not my problem, mine are my life and there's nothing I can do anyway.
Re: Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score:2)
I haven't posted here in years but maybe y'all could use a bit of help...
History of the workweek
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
Im shocked my id still works.
Kudos to slashdot.
Equilibrium
[2]https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2... [scry.llc]
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/27/work-week/
[2] https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/27/equilibrium/
Re: (Score:3)
I'm 54 and stricken down by terminal cancer. I'm unemployable at this point.
I wish being "unemployable" were my biggest problem.
lower the medicare age! (Score:2)
lower the medicare age!