XPost: alt.economics

On 6/3/25 12:31, Jim Wilkins wrote:

"a425couple"  wrote in message news:imF%P.890618$6%[email protected]...

Yo Jim - a good read for you
It was in my Seattle Times, 6-3-25 page A-11
by Kevin Roose (NYT)
For some recent grads the AI job apocalypse may
already be here

While you are at it you might also enjoy views
of the new luxury 787-9 Dreamliner interior

---------------------------

I can't read it without a subscription.

Here you go

For some recent grads, the AI job apocalypse may already be here | Analysis June 1, 2025 at 10:14 am
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has jumped as
companies try to replace entry-level workers with artificial
intelligence. (Lorenzo Matteucci/The New York Times)
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has jumped as
companies try to replace entry-level workers with artificial
intelligence. (Lorenzo Matteucci/The New York Times)

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has jumped as
companies try to replace entry-level workers with artificial
intelligence. (Lorenzo Matteucci/The New York Times)
Skip Ad

By KEVIN ROOSE
The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — This month, millions of young people will graduate from college 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.

Related Microsoft cuts 1,985 WA workers as it lays off 3% of global staff Anecdotes like these don’t add up to mass joblessness, of course. Most economists believe there are multiple factors behind the rise in
unemployment for college graduates, including a hiring slowdown by Big
Tech companies and broader uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s economic policies.

But among people who pay close attention to what’s happening in AI,
alarms are starting to go off.

“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. You could
use AI to automate some routine back-office tasks — and many companies
did — but when it came to the more complex and technical parts of many
jobs, AI couldn’t hold a candle to humans.

That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software
engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure. (Such
as: Does the code work or not?) In these fields, AI systems can be
trained using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning
to perform complex sequences of actions on their own. Eventually, they
can become competent at carrying out tasks that would take human workers
hours or days to complete.


This approach was on display last month at an event held by Anthropic,
the AI company that makes the Claude chatbot. The company claims that
its most powerful model, Claude Opus 4, can now code for “several hours” without stopping — a tantalizing possibility if you’re a company
accustomed to paying six-figure engineer salaries for that kind of productivity.

AI companies are starting with software engineering and other technical
fields because that’s where the low-hanging fruit is. (And, perhaps,
because that’s where their own labor costs are highest.) But these
companies believe the same techniques will soon be used to automate work
in dozens of occupations, ranging from consulting to finance to marketing.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, recently predicted that AI could
eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.

Sign up for Evening Brief
Delivered weeknights, this email newsletter gives you a quick recap of
the day's top stories and need-to-know news, as well as intriguing
photos and topics to spark conversation as you wind down from your day.

Related Microsoft wants to radically change the way you surf the web
That timeline could be wildly off, if firms outside tech adopt AI more
slowly than many Silicon Valley companies have, or if it’s harder than expected to automate jobs in more creative and open-ended occupations
where training data is scarce.

Even if AI doesn’t take all the entry-level jobs right away, two trends concern me.


The first is that, in a rush to boost productivity and stay ahead of the
curve, some companies may be turning to AI too early, before the tools
are robust enough to handle full entry-level workloads. (We recently saw
an example of this in Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company,
which declared two years ago that it was replacing customer service
agents with AI chatbots, only to reverse course and rehire humans after customers complained.)

Some executives are making a calculated bet that AI systems will improve quickly — or that the money they stand to save by employing virtual
workers instead of human ones is worth a few unhappy customers. But
others may not realize the risks they’re taking.

The second is that even if entry-level jobs don’t disappear right away,
the expectation that those jobs are short-lived may lead companies to underinvest in job training, mentorship and other programs aimed at
entry-level workers. That could leave those workers unprepared for more
senior roles later on.

Most Read Business Stories
Microsoft lays off hundreds of WA workers, weeks after companywide cuts
Alaska Airlines launches nonstop flight from Seattle to Rome
Alaska Air drops summer flights, delays plane delivery over tariff concern
A 355-year-old company that once owned a third of Canada is going away VIEW Snack Wrap unwrapped: Here’s why McDonald’s is bringing back a fan
favorite on July 10 VIEW
“Nobody has patience or time for hand-holding in this new environment,
where a lot of the work can be done by AI autonomously,” said Heather
Doshay, the head of people and talent at venture capital firm SignalFire.

If there’s a silver lining for recent graduates, it’s that — at least
for some of them — the threat of AI replacement seems to be lighting a
useful kind of fire. Some young workers I spoke to are using their
experience with AI to vault themselves ahead of more senior colleagues,
and others are steering clear of the traditional ladder-climbing
professions altogether.

Trevor Chow, 23, a recent Stanford University graduate living in San
Francisco, said many friends had weighed AI progress among their
considerations when looking for jobs. Few of them were going into
traditional tech and finance careers, he said, and more were doing risky
things like starting companies — on the theory that if humans are about
to lose their labor advantages to powerful AI systems, they had better
hurry and do something big.

“It feels like there aren’t that many years left to do things,” he said. “If the amount of leverage you have as a human becomes very small, a lot
of career paths that don’t pay off for many years aren’t worthwhile.”

This story was originally published at nytimes.com. Read it here.
The Seattle Times does not append comment threads to stories from wire
services such as the Associated Press, The New York Times, The
Washington Post or Bloomberg News. Rather, we focus on discussions
related to local stories by our own staff. You can read more about our community policies here.
Recom

What will happen when AI plots to replace management, which is
particularly vulnerable to more accurate decision makers?
What if it wins an election for its human attendant?

Military AI is at the tipping point of making its own kill decisions,
the justification being to avoid a fragile comm link. Homing torpedoes
have acceptably done that since WW2.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)