AI is killing jobs right now. It's going to get worse.
We don't need to wait to see if AI will kill jobs. It's happening right now.
I've been writing about automation for years, and I've often warned that artificial intelligence was going to kill a lot of jobs. Automation always kills some jobs, but the question becomes whether it will create more jobs than it kills. The other question is who will be qualified for the jobs it creates. As things stand, AI is already killing jobs, and the people who are losing their livelihoods aren't generally finding new work in the world of AI.
It's certainly possible AI will create jobs we haven't even considered yet at some point in the future, but let's look at how AI is disrupting industries and eliminating workers right now. According to a new research paper from Stanford University, AI is starting to kill many entry-level jobs in areas like customer service and software engineering. Employment in these roles has dropped by roughly 13 percent since 2022.
If you can't get an entry-level job somewhere because AI is doing that work, then it's pretty hard for a young person to get started in an industry. You can't work your way up to a senior role if there aren't any junior roles available. The people working in AI aren't even hiding what might be coming, as Anthropic's CEO told Axios in May that he expects it to wipe out half of entry-level jobs within five years. I don't tend to trust what these people say, but that's worth noting.
In the media industry, journalists are seeing AI threaten their jobs in multiple ways. Obviously, there's the trend of companies trying to replace journalists with AI. However, another effect AI is having is that AI-generated Google search summaries are reducing the number of people who click on articles, which is causing journalists to get laid off while web traffic plummets.
I've had colleagues in the journalism industry tell me they were recently laid off, and they've often pointed to this problem. If fewer people are visiting your website, that typically means your company has to downsize to some degree.
A report that came out in July found that 61 percent of white-collar tech workers believe their job could be eliminated by AI within five years. Whether they're right or not, that's a lot of people seemingly dealing with job insecurity.
People who argue that AI is good for the economy and will create more jobs than it destroys can rarely tell us what those jobs are going to be. We just have to trust them, I suppose. We'll all love writing prompts all day or something. They'll say that people always argue that automation is going to be a disaster, and things always turn out just fine. Tell that to the people who suffered for decades after the Industrial Revolution.
Furthermore, you can't necessarily look to the past to explain what will happen with AI. The invention of the cotton gin or a robot that can weld is not the same as one that could mimic a human and fill countless roles that humans currently fill. I know AI isn't there yet—a lot of it kind of sucks—but we're quickly moving toward a place where it'll be good enough for a lot of bosses to decide to make the switch.
