AI-maggedon for young professionals may be on the horizon, according to AI entrepreneur and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei.
“AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years,” Axios summarized from their interview with Amodei last month.
This seemed inflammatory at first glance, but it’s possible that young graduates are already feeling the effects of automation on their job prospects. In the first quarter of 2025, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates rose to 5.8%, the highest since 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic could explain 2021, but the jury is out on what’s going on in 2025. While market instability due to the Trump administration’s tariff policy could be one explanation, another theory is that a fundamental shift is taking place in the market.
Many journalists, economists and LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer are now speculating that entry-level, white-collar jobs will be the first heads to roll in the AI revolution. Jobs that require simple coding, basic research or other menial computer tasks can be assigned to AI and monitored by a much smaller number of entry-level or mid-level employees.
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It’s too soon to call it an economic crisis, but that doesn’t warrant a lack of preparation on our part. As university students, we will graduate into this demographic group shortly, and the landscape could look very different in the next few years. Even if Amodei is only partially correct in his theorizing, we’ve got a problem on our hands.
Or do we? I had always thought that automation — at least in its most optimistic framing — was supposed to enable us to live differently, work less and make the most of our time on earth.
One of my concerns is that no one seems to be putting forth that positive spin. Work is still our unquestionable, unspoken God in the United States. When I lived in France, they had a saying: “Americans live to work, we work to live.”
There seems to be an inability to reimagine the economy so that everyone can work a good paying job for fewer hours. Rather, companies continue to work off the 40-hours-per-week model and refuse to raise wages to match inflation.
Our economy is not based on fulfilling people’s employment needs so that we all prosper, but the maximization of productivity and intelligence. Since deindustrialization and the rise of the knowledge economy, degreed workers have supported new economic needs in computer technology, communications and beyond.
But AI destabilizes the established order, because if productivity and intelligence are the name of the game, what’s the use of human beings? We can’t be productive at all hours of the day, and can’t hold onto the amount of knowledge a super computer can.
“We are about to get hit by AI like a truck,” said journalist Ezra Klein on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in March. “One of the things that I hope (is that my children) live in a future that values human beings. We have, for a long time, pushed human beings to act like machines.”
We, especially Americans, need a new concept of human worth than the one we’ve been exalting for the last 80 years.
An entry-level job isn’t just about doing the work. It’s historically meant to be an opportunity for a young person to make connections and learn how to become a mid-level employee through professional development and long-term financial support.
But languishing on-the-job training programs, the slow death of pensions and an inability to meaningfully move up the corporate ladder have made Gen Z the job hopper generation.
Some old folks harp about Gen Z “not wanting to work” nor stay at the same organization, but it seems to me that younger people are playing their economic hand in the best way they can, and company benefits simply do not pay off the way they did decades ago.
A subsection of young people are opting out of the traditional workplace altogether. The New York Times reported that some college graduates are starting their own businesses and making riskier career moves in this uncertain environment.
But there isn’t enough space in the economy for large numbers of graduates to do that. In a moment of widespread anti-institutionalism, Gen Z sees the workplace as what it is: transactional. A company cannot use AI to displace workers and continue to claim that their organization is “like a family.”
It’s about to get rough out there. While there are some predictions about what the future economy will value in humans — like social skills, self-motivation, tech competency and adaptability — with AI here to stay, we also need to consider what the future economy can do for humans. Because, as humans, isn’t that ultimately what it’s all about?
Grace is a graduate student studying urban planning.
