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Title: Is the AI Job Apocalypse Already Here for Some Recent Grads?

Link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/06/0...

"This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports
the New York Times, "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." 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 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. 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 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... "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...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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