COMPUTER SAYS NO

Young Workers Take a Major Hit as AI Wipes Out Entry-Level Jobs

Fresh graduates are being pushed out of the workforce at an alarming rate.

AI is changing the game for career starters and threatens a desperate new era for freshly graduated hopefuls. The rise of AI has led to a significant and measurable decline in job prospects for younger, less-experienced workers, according to a landmark study by Stanford. Research, conducted by analyzing payroll data, reveals that employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles such as software development and customer support has plummeted by 16 percent since late 2022. That is a stark contrast with older workers in the same fields who have not seen a measurable decline in their job prospects, the report says. “There’s definitely evidence that AI is beginning to have a big effect,” lead researcher and economist Erik Brynjolfsson told Axios. Part of the reason younger workers are being affected is that their lack of experience makes them more reliant on “book knowledge,” which AI can replicate more easily. Senior workers, however, “learn tricks of the trade that maybe never get written down. Those are not the things that the AI has been able to learn, at least not yet.”