If A.I. Takes the Jobs of Young People, How Will They React?

It is hard, so far, to find conclusive evidence that A.I. is already replacing young college workers. At the same time, it seems ridiculous, or at least a bit irresponsible, not to acknowledge that many industries probably could replace a healthy portion of their workers with A.I., or that jobs such as software engineering have been irrevocably changed in the past two years. Focussing simply on tech, it seems impossible to believe that there will be no labor impact, given that many programmers now simply tell Claude or Gemini to do some stuff in Python rather than doing it themselves. Last year, a Stanford Digital Economy Lab study titled “Canaries in the Coal Mine” showed that the number of employed twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-old software developers fell by roughly twenty per cent between 2src22 and 2src25. The study also found that occupations with more exposure to A.I. experienced a greater decline in the employment of twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-olds than those with less exposure. And the authors found that much of this job loss was concentrated in fields that used generative A.I. for automating, rather than augmenting, some tasks.

If you accept these findings, and believe that they are quiet indicators of a coming reckoning, then the question is whether what has happened to companies with a lot of exposure to A.I. will spread to other industries. Will it reach management consulting or payroll management or insurance or architecture or media?

The answer, I imagine, is yes, at least for a while. Not necessarily because A.I. actually can do most white-collar entry-level jobs well, but because companies are incentivized to cut payroll—and because management at these companies tends to live and die by their handling of new technology, which makes them uniquely subservient to the dictates of Silicon Valley. This might not mean mass layoffs across every white-collar industry, obviously. But it could mean that an advertising agency that once had, say, forty entry-level positions might soon have twenty-five, ten of which might be, effectively, low-paid internships.

The youth resistance to this coming reality has, in any case, already begun. Commencement speakers who mention A.I., or who, God forbid, work for A.I. companies, are getting roundly booed by students. More telling, many polls show that college students and recent graduates are more skeptical of A.I. than the general public is. A Gallup poll surveying Gen Z’s emotions regarding A.I. found that “anger” had increased over the course of the year, while “excitement” had dropped noticeably. Nearly half of the employed respondents said that A.I.’s risks for the workforce “outweigh the potential benefits.” An analysis by Pew found that forty-eight per cent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds were “skeptical about AI’s future impact,” compared with just thirty-five per cent of those above the age of sixty-five.

These attitudes have already begun to affect political results. In the Wisconsin governor’s race, for instance, much of the support for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Francesca Hong, stemmed from her maverick stance against data centers. Hong not only supports a conditional moratorium on building data centers in Wisconsin but has also proposed eliminating automatic tax exemptions from A.I. data centers that are attempting to operate in the state. Unsurprisingly, Hong polls strongly among young voters. It’s possible that data centers are becoming an electoral dividing line—young voters, in particular, might begin to oppose any candidate who they suspect has been bought off by big tech.

Like some of the other trends I’ve discussed in this series, the brewing youth revolt against A.I. is still a bit formless. Young people are not exactly immiserated; nor have all their jobs been taken over by Claude, at least not yet. But A.I. automation is another reason that many young people may believe the future is hopeless and that an American renewal will not take place in their lifetimes.