Great piece, Charlie. I agree with everything except the conclusion, which I don't see as being supported. Yes, juniors will be needed to do the things you say. However, how many such juniors will be needed? I could see something like 25% of juniors being employed in the capacities you describe, both for reasons of skill/aptitude match and because a single such junior can do the work of many more — and the ability to pay for such juniors will not be great.
For the rest who lack the skills or cannot get into a sufficiently-high-value seat, they'll have to find something else to do, and I don't expect it'll be pretty.
In 2023, the latest number available, the full-time employment rate for bachelor’s degree graduates (within six months of finishing) is around 57%. Not a number any of us are happy about, I'm sure. Over the preceding ten years the high point was 59%. What will that number be in 5 years? 10 years? My wild-guess-gun-to-head-right-now is 45% and then 35%.
Thanks for the comment. I guess I am more optimistic :). Just based on history, my guess is the current job displacement will be replaced by new jobs. As examples, offices in the 40's and 50's used to be filled with "calculators" and "computers" - which were rows and rows of humans doing what we now think of as grunt work. Calculator and Computer were actual job descriptions. And when the products came there was fear that jobs would be gone with no jobs to replace them. And yet we had whole new job roles emerge.
IMHO, humans have had a poor ability to predict the future besides extrapolating based on the present.
The scale of job destruction is new here. Calculators and Computers were not a similar % of the economy as the jobs at risk of being automated now.
I would love to be wrong about this but I dont see why this doesnt lead to vast discarding of a slice of the socioeconomic ladder — roughly the 60-90% slice who are currently employed in white-collar work, in the bottom three-quarters of large organizations. Think finance, commerce, media.
If I’m right and these folks are much more unemployed than ever, then they will be available for cheap. The best of them are employed as per your article. The rest of them are available on good terms. But, to do what? Anything they might do can be done better and cheaper by a machine, I expect. I dont like this but facts dont care about my feelings. I expect political solutions will be demanded and attempted. Making it illegal for certain things to be done by AI, for example.
Oh I also will add I find it totally interesting that half of the responses to this post have been about AI replacing the majority of Jobs and the other half about how AI can't even replace 1 job. In reality it will likely be in the middle for now...
"AI can't even replace 1 job" is so silly. A quarter of illustrators (26%) and over a third of translators (36%) have already lost work due to generative AI. https://archive.is/m9bWe#selection-931.0-931.114
Yeah on a scale level it feels closer to the industrial revolution, where we went from a large agrarian society to less than 5%. Ofc this also spurred on the great depression and other problems so it is not without problems.
Also, according to our future ChatGPT Overlords, Computer revolution replaced about 10-15% of jobs if you include factory automation.
Just because actual tasks are getting replaced by AI I don't believe 60-90% are going to be jobless. Instead I think companies will be able to do 2x-5x more with AI before they are blocked by things humans need to review.
The jobs will change. People focused on creating things will have to get used to gating/managing/curating multiple agents at the same time.
AI is like 80-90% there but the last 20-10% is always the hardest to get right.
I wasn't suggesting that 60-90% are going to be jobless.
I believe that 30% of college graduates are going to "lose their place". The people who are in the 60th to 90th percentile of the graduating cohort across the country. These are the people who today occupy the lower strata of national organizations. Those organizations will discover they don't need as many juniors, and will gain significantly by scaling back their junior hiring.
Great piece, Charlie. I agree with everything except the conclusion, which I don't see as being supported. Yes, juniors will be needed to do the things you say. However, how many such juniors will be needed? I could see something like 25% of juniors being employed in the capacities you describe, both for reasons of skill/aptitude match and because a single such junior can do the work of many more — and the ability to pay for such juniors will not be great.
For the rest who lack the skills or cannot get into a sufficiently-high-value seat, they'll have to find something else to do, and I don't expect it'll be pretty.
In 2023, the latest number available, the full-time employment rate for bachelor’s degree graduates (within six months of finishing) is around 57%. Not a number any of us are happy about, I'm sure. Over the preceding ten years the high point was 59%. What will that number be in 5 years? 10 years? My wild-guess-gun-to-head-right-now is 45% and then 35%.
https://chatgpt.com/share/685477eb-d014-8007-8f61-ad1eb33bfab4
Thanks for the comment. I guess I am more optimistic :). Just based on history, my guess is the current job displacement will be replaced by new jobs. As examples, offices in the 40's and 50's used to be filled with "calculators" and "computers" - which were rows and rows of humans doing what we now think of as grunt work. Calculator and Computer were actual job descriptions. And when the products came there was fear that jobs would be gone with no jobs to replace them. And yet we had whole new job roles emerge.
IMHO, humans have had a poor ability to predict the future besides extrapolating based on the present.
Amusingly I am extrapolating myself hah!
The scale of job destruction is new here. Calculators and Computers were not a similar % of the economy as the jobs at risk of being automated now.
I would love to be wrong about this but I dont see why this doesnt lead to vast discarding of a slice of the socioeconomic ladder — roughly the 60-90% slice who are currently employed in white-collar work, in the bottom three-quarters of large organizations. Think finance, commerce, media.
If I’m right and these folks are much more unemployed than ever, then they will be available for cheap. The best of them are employed as per your article. The rest of them are available on good terms. But, to do what? Anything they might do can be done better and cheaper by a machine, I expect. I dont like this but facts dont care about my feelings. I expect political solutions will be demanded and attempted. Making it illegal for certain things to be done by AI, for example.
Oh I also will add I find it totally interesting that half of the responses to this post have been about AI replacing the majority of Jobs and the other half about how AI can't even replace 1 job. In reality it will likely be in the middle for now...
"AI can't even replace 1 job" is so silly. A quarter of illustrators (26%) and over a third of translators (36%) have already lost work due to generative AI. https://archive.is/m9bWe#selection-931.0-931.114
Yeah on a scale level it feels closer to the industrial revolution, where we went from a large agrarian society to less than 5%. Ofc this also spurred on the great depression and other problems so it is not without problems.
Also, according to our future ChatGPT Overlords, Computer revolution replaced about 10-15% of jobs if you include factory automation.
Just because actual tasks are getting replaced by AI I don't believe 60-90% are going to be jobless. Instead I think companies will be able to do 2x-5x more with AI before they are blocked by things humans need to review.
The jobs will change. People focused on creating things will have to get used to gating/managing/curating multiple agents at the same time.
AI is like 80-90% there but the last 20-10% is always the hardest to get right.
I wasn't suggesting that 60-90% are going to be jobless.
I believe that 30% of college graduates are going to "lose their place". The people who are in the 60th to 90th percentile of the graduating cohort across the country. These are the people who today occupy the lower strata of national organizations. Those organizations will discover they don't need as many juniors, and will gain significantly by scaling back their junior hiring.