In a new paper, several Stanford economists studied payroll data from the private company ADP, which covers millions of workers, through mid-2025. They found that young workers aged 22–25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT. Notably, the economists found that older workers and less-exposed jobs, such as home health aides, saw steady or rising employment. “There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote the paper with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, told the Wall Street Journal.
In five months, the question of “Is AI reducing work for young Americans?” has its fourth answer: from possibly, to definitely, to almost certainly no, to plausibly yes. You might find this back-and-forth annoying. I think it’s fantastic. This is a model for what I want from public commentary on social and economic trends: Smart, quantitatively rich, and good-faith debate of issues of seismic consequence to American society.
How can ai be destroying jobs I havent seen a single good implementation except maybe dev work but even then its not speeding anything up.
as a consultant/freelancer dev whose entire workload for the past year has been cleaning up AI slop, no with dev it hasn’t been what I would say a smooth or even good implementation. for my wallet? been a fantastic implementation, for everyone else? not so much.
The thing is as a TOOL it’s great depending on the model. As a rubber duck? fantastic. As something that the majority of companies have utilized with vibe coding to build something end to end? no, it’s horrible. It can’t scale anything, implements exploits left right and center, and unlike junior devs doesn’t learn anything. If you don’t hold its hand during a build then it’ll quickly go off the rails. It’ll implement old APIs or libraries or whatever simply because those things have the most documentation attached to it.
An example. a few weeks ago a client wanted to set up a private git instance with Forgejo. They had Claude Code set it up for them. the problem? Claude went with Forgejo 1.20. ForgeJo is currently on 12.0. MASSIVE security hole right there. Why did Claude do that? 1.20 had more documentation as opposed to 12.0. And when I say “documentation” I could simply be referring to blog posts, articles, whatever that talked about it more than the latest version because The LLM’s will leverage that stuff when making decisions for builds. You also see it if you want something in Rust+Smithy. Majority of the time the AI will go for a very outdated version of Smithy because that’s what a lot of people talked about at one point. So you’re generating massive tech debt before even throwing something into production.
Now like I said as a tool? a problem solver for a function you can’t figure out? it’s great. the issue is like I said companies aren’t seeing it as a tool, they’re seeing it as a cost saving replacement for a living human being which it is not. It’s like replacing construction worker with a hammer attached to a drone and then wondering why your house frame keeps falling over.
AI is this decade’s Rational Rose.
Junior devs and sysadmins who do not much very useful stuff yet, but get some basic experience. And people whose main required traits are human voice and following script.
Transient processes are a thing, one can have plenty of middle and senior devs and sysadmins, with the economy not producing new ones anymore. So the employers are hiring those, and replacing juniors with AI. Whether that works I’m not sure.
So at some point the AI bubble will be over (at least in dev and sysadmin and such work), but there will be fewer developers, and there might eventually be a situation where there are fewer qualified developers in the economy overall. Which would give centralized corporate things a market advantage over smaller non-corporate things, due to cost of development growing after the fall happening now.
While for some not very qualified jobs humans won’t be needed anymore - while that “AI” is expensive, it might really be, even after the bubble crash, more affordable than hiring a human (in a western country) for a bullshit job - except in everything I’ve read those bullshit jobs were treated as social responsibility to teach work ethic to growing generations, that weird mix of individualist and working class themes in books describing pre-Depression USA. Yes, individualism is important and being self-reliant is important, but even that protestant ethic wasn’t about capitalism more than it was about dignity and hard work.
I think Silicon Valley is consciously playing Asimov’s Foundation with our planet (seeding technologies affecting humanity’s development by some schedule with expected global results), except where Asimov’s Foundation was about preserving knowledge and civilization, they are moving in the opposite direction. That is, they may not understand it. They may think they are building that sci-fi empire the Foundation begins with. But in actuality they are breaking concrete and steel things that work and replace them with paper huts kinda resembling something that would work better. Metaphorically.
They don’t understand what an empire is, neither the “mandate of heaven” kind nor the “unity of civilization” kind (heck, even the Soviet covertly Christian “building the city of sun” kind, like in Vysotsky’s song - “… но сады сторожат и стреляют без промаха в лоб”). You don’t build an empire by burning libraries and poisoning discourses, you also don’t build an empire by making every its citizen uncertain whether they are a free man or a slave (it’s a common misconception to start an attempt at an empire from points where previous empires failed ; that state is usually expected to fail again for the same reasons).
The company I work for has replaced a lot of its employees with AI. It’s absolutely useless and we have to cover the loss but the fact it doesn’t work very well doesn’t help the fired employees.
Customer service, AI voice assistance is interacting with customers, which was usually done by people.
It doesn’t matter if the implementation is good. All that matters is that middle management gets more stuff “done” with fewer people. Where the definition of “done” is just tgat it hasn’t exploded in their face… yet…
It’s doesnt have to work, it just has to be convincing enough to get the bean counters and/or incompetent/sociopathic upper management to buy in to the idea that they can save money.
Same as always, if the shitstorm created by a decision isn’t immediately devastating or can be incontrovertibly tied to said decision then that’s just BAU.
but the time the shitshow starts playing the preroll trailers the golden parachutes and bonuses have been claimed.
For them, this isn’t broken, this is how the game works.
It being shit does not stop corporations for using it, especially for stuff like customer service.
There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.
The junior resources are going to struggle to find jobs because they are lacking in the KSAs that schools simply cannot provide training for. And that means when us Gen Xers and later Millenials retire there could be a major gap where we have few people with that inherent knowledge to replace us. And where there’s no work and no hope, you get something akin to what is starting to occur in China right now…or revolt.
My hope is that schools will be rethought and there will be a lot more focus on getting an internship early and for the long term. Something more like apprenticeships, which the blue collar workforce maintained, but it’s something we’ll likely need to bring back to white collar jobs.
This isn’t to say that schools should diminish a well rounded education. I think it’s extremely important for students to take electives outside of their focus for a multitude of reasons, one being that it helps students realize the importance of how others contribute to society.
Apprenticeships can help to fill the knowledge gap, but the white collars that are in the jobs now will also need to be retrained and made comfortable to work with a large influx of apprentices to make this approach a success.
There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.
Counterpoint: no, they are not. Not with the current path of tech progress on the field, at least.
Because seniors well versed in company practices and culture will get tired of having to manually redo junior work corrections really quick, and we are nowhere close to closing the error correction needs at this point.
Repetitive work that could feasibly have been automated or removed already? Maybe. There was a TON of room for automation that people weren’t investing on doing and the AI gold rush will feasibly take advantage of some of that. But AI replacing junior jobs wholesale? Nah. The tech isn’t there.
Exactly. The senior is willing to put up with the constant questions and mistakes of a junior/intern, because after a few months, they will be better and take some workload off the senior’s shoulders.
With “AI”, there is no learning curve, it’s like you get a different fresh intern every day, and you have to correct the same mistakes constantly.
Agreed, the narrative to which you’re responding is the sales pitch and won’t be born out by reality long-term
You really think education reform is going to win out over creating a giant pool of uneducated serfs for Jeff‘s warehouses? I would give anything for your sense of optimism, honestly.
Yes, I do, because we are many and we persevere.
Here we are celebrating Labor Day, the day that celebrates workers rights - overtime pay for working over 40 hours, limiting children from having to work in factories, weekends and time off.
It was a hard fight from serfdom to poor factory conditions to now. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
kind of seems like the ladder getting pulled up
kind of seems like the ladder getting pulled up
Finally the chance for an inverse headline.
“AI is destroying the Millennial industry”
Meh. Nothing in this article is strong evidence of anything. They’re only looking at a tiny sample of data and wildly speculating about which entry-level jobs are being supplanted by AI.
As a software engineer who uses AI, I fail to see how AI can replace any given entry-level software engineering position. There’s no way! Any company that does that is just asking for trouble.
What’s more likely, is that AI is making senior software engineers more productive so they don’t need to hire more developers to assist them with more trivial/time consuming tasks.
This is a very temporary thing, though. As anyone in software can tell you: Software only gets more complex over time. Eventually these companies will have to start hiring new people again. This process usually takes about six months to a year.
If AI is causing a drop in entry-level hiring, my speculation (which isn’t as wild as in the article since I’m actually there on the ground using this stuff) is that it’s just a temporary blip while companies work out how to take advantage the slightly-enhanced productivity.
It’s inevitable: They’ll start new projects to build new stuff because now—suddenly—they have the budget. Then they’ll hire people to make up the difference.
This is how companies have worked since the invention of bullshit jobs. The need for bullshit grows with productivity.
Top upvoted comment just tore a big fat hole into the entire argument and I have to say, good for the comments section. That’s so rare.
One open question here is whether we’re seeing youth employment decrease because AI is effectively replacing entry level workers in these fields, or because executives wrongly think AI can or will soon be able to do so?
You have to assume that if anybody puts a hiring freeze for junior employees right now it’d be out of some combination of caution, hype and insecurity about the economic landscape thanks to the usual suspects.
Turns out if the discussion is “quantitatively rich” but is ignoring the obvious qualitative observation it may end up flip-flopping a bunch. I’m not sure I’m as excited about that as the author, because man, is that a constant of the modern corporate world and does it suck and cost people money and stress.
There’s also the possibility of broader economic headwinds causing decreased youth employment, even if they haven’t hit older workers yet.
The “researchers” in no way demonstrate that “AI” replaced any of the jobs lost. They don’t even raise the question of whether “AI” is used to discipline labor despite not being much of a productivity aid.
You’re right. I could believe these data might be explained by a lot of businesses being in a “wait and see” phase, hiring conservatively while they see how the AI thing shakes out
Damn technofeudalism is near.
