AI Is Taking Young People’s Jobs and Worsening a Broken Labor Market

Let’s take my personal example of an entry-level job that likely would not exist today, and without it, who knows where I would be right now. I graduated in 2009 into a wonderful job market everyone remembers very fondly and definitely didn’t shape an entire generation of people like me to distrust our economic system, but I still found work. It was a struggle, but just before I was ready to move back into my childhood home after college, I got a job at a telecommunications company just outside Boston. I woke up at 4 a.m. every morning and rode the red line with a very interesting cast of characters, all so I could call brand-new phone lines that that were just installed and record what happened in a database. It was a job that quite literally any person could do.

But I was promoted from it after a few months into the account manager job every other young twenty something in big cities has. This got me on a sales track that led to me writing an article about how merchant services sales are a big scam, and here I am today as Splinter’s Editor-in-Chief. Even in the wake of the Great Recession which harmed the job prospects of everyone who graduated into it for their entire lives, there were still likely more entry-level tracks to stable work than there are in the age of AI.

In October, The British Standards Institution published a study with a finding they called a “job-pocalypse” for young job-seekers. As The Guardian wrote, “Four in 10 (41 percent) of bosses said AI was allowing them to cut the number of employees in a survey of more than 850 business leaders across seven countries: the UK, US, France, Germany, Australia, China and Japan…Nearly a third (31 percent) of those surveyed said their organisation was looking at AI solutions before considering hiring a person, with two-fifths expecting this to be the case within five years.”

As Wired noted back in August, Stanford economists found that there has been a 16 percent decline in employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in industries that are vulnerable to AI-powered automation, like customer service and software development. You could absolutely replace my old account manager job with some kind of software for a fraction of what it cost to pay me to hang around in front of a computer all day, all so I had money to pay my bar tab that night and help create more economic growth for Boston’s service industry. Now those cost savings I was putting into Boston’s economy go into Peter Thiel and company’s pockets. What a win for society!

A Deloitte survey this year found that 63 percent of zoomers and 65 percent of millennials “worry that gen AI will eliminate jobs,” while 61 percent of both “worry gen AI will make it harder for younger generations to enter the workforce, as it automates tasks typically performed by entry-level workers.” Young people aren’t coming to this conclusion in filibuster-proof majorities because they believe Sam Altman to be some sort of demigod and take all his PR speak as gospel, but because 16 percent of workers in entry-level customer service and software development is a lot of people, and the disappearance of entry-level jobs disproportionately affects young people who have less work on their resumes. This is something they are experiencing themselves and within their networks, not hallucinating like an LLM.

And there is no plan in place anywhere from the supposed adults in the room to address this growing crisis for the future of the American workforce. We are told by the Kevin Hassetts of the world that the supposed productivity gains that come from AI (that are far less concrete than its negative effects on the labor market) will make everything hunky dory while Elon Musk provides the globe with “universal high income,” but they all fall silent when talked about the job losses it will bring and is bringing. This is the explicit AI plan. This is not some hyperbole rooted in AI CEOs promising every other CEO in the world that they’re on the cusp of being able to fire all their workers so they can raise more funding. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds is 10.5 percent, a level it hasn’t reached since late 2016 as it fell from its peak of just under 20 percent in the wake of the Great Recession. AI is automating away new entry-level tasks as you read this.

The story from AI’s evangelists is that past technological advancements have killed jobs, yet they created just as many or more new ones. But AI is not like past technological advancements where you still had low-level workers typing into a computer. It is an unmatched automator of rote tasks, and even if it does create more jobs higher up in the org chart, the bottom of it is gone forever. It’s an AI layer now. How do you expect the people to fill the top part of the org chart in the future if there’s no entry-level work to be had in the first place?

The Broken Labor Market

America is rapidly spiraling into a vastly mismatched labor and job market, and yet again, there is no plan in place for the people who will define our future. This generation of elites will likely be remembered as the first in human history to leave things worse off than they found them for their children. It’s an unprecedented betrayal, and it’s blowing back on to the rest of us in the form of a growing existential crisis about what kind of an economy America is actually capable of producing in the 21st century. It’s definitely not the behemoth we have all become accustomed to.

The Dallas Fed wrote a paper last month about a new labor market reality where the United States may be on a path of lower inherent growth and a far lower break-even unemployment rate, while Trump is dramatically exacerbating that dynamic with his assault on immigration. The trend of everything this century is that elite decay allowed America to collapse from the inside, and now bad actors control these systems, while civilized society is dealing with the myriad consequences of institutional rot.

The existential crisis for our economy is already here, by the way. This is not some abstract futuristic concept, but a central narrative emerging from this year’s strange and unexpected job market that’s a lot more complex than just Trump’s economic and immigration policies crushing growth (though they certainly play a part!). In 2014, 35 percent of employers around the world said they were struggling to find the skilled talent they need in the annual Talent Shortage Survey run by Manpower Group.

Today that figure is 74 percent—71 percent in the United States.

Ford’s CEO Jim Farley said last week that he has 5,000 open mechanic jobs paying $120,000 he can’t find qualified workers for. “We are in trouble in our country,” he said. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, and tradesmen. It’s a very serious thing…We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for his family.”

Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce published a report in July which found that “there is an annual shortage of nearly 712,000 certificates and associate’s degrees aligned with high-paying middle-skills occupations, projected to last until at least 2032.” This mismatch between jobs and job seekers has long predated the rise of AI, as Boston University professor Scott Solberg told Politico in 2022 prior to ChatGPT’s launch that “This is a crisis point. We have to have a national conversation about how we’re going to elevate career readiness.”

But we’re not doing that. We’re diving headlong into the abyss and damning an entire generation to figure out an unknown future on their own. It’s very fitting that after reaching a “crisis point” for a job market unsuited to our labor market, America’s answer was to find a way to make it worse by destroying more entry-level jobs with no plan to replace them outside a shameless level of hype that now has AI CEOs publicly talking about hedging their AI bets.

This country revealed itself as one ruled by a gerontocratic aristocracy run by a group of elite pedophiles directing the most shambolic smash and grab operation in history, and greed is very obviously the only animating principle of those who control the world. The only life us millennials and zoomers know is one where our powerful elders are stripping our future for parts so they can amass more wealth in the present, and the inherent fraud of their operations has routinely been revealed for all to see–like in 2008, which is increasingly feeling like a preview of the big fraudulent bust to come.

AI is in many respects the logical conclusion of this elite war on the youth this century, as it is an attempt to vaporize the entire entry-level job market, destroying an entire generation’s career prospects forever and telling them that their only recourse is to become an expert in understanding the robot that took their job. This is an age of breakdown, where hubris is coming for yet another empire to sweep it into the dustbin of history, assisted by AI.