This past year, I’ve seen a lot of entry-level jobs quietly disappear. It’s not that people are getting laid off, it’s that no one’s hiring beginners anymore. What’s really missing isn’t just the jobs, it’s the chance to grow. If there’s nowhere to start, how are new people supposed to get in and learn?
Sadly, they will just have to try harder. It is still doable especially for an American, and I'm not a fan of these doomsayers' prophesying. There is still hope because TikTok and video games are putting most young people in a trance.
Video and graphical designers? I’m not saying this with optimism, but rather as as observation. I know a handful of digital marketers, that work for different marketing firms - and the use of GenAI for those tasks have exploded. Usually tasks which they either had in-house people, or freelancers do the work. Now they just do it themselves.
No it can't replace graphical designers except in low stakes projects. Companies won't risk their projects on cheap AI with other larger costs on the line.
Instead of replace, think reduce. A graphical designer/lead might have farmed out some work to a contractor, with AI they now just do it themselves. It doesn't look like 'cheap AI' because they used the tools to augment their skills - not replace.
I don't know what it is about AI that makes people think in absolutes.
>What I've found is that only Americans exhibit self-starting and creativity. Isn't that mostly a function of how incentives are aligned? I had a job with a lot of outsourcing to India. The Indians were given specific bits of code to write. They didn't even know how their code fit into the application. Their entire incentive structure was geared toward getting them to write those bits of code as quickly as possible,…
It could be. But I worked at companies where we had full time employees all around the world, all of whom had full access to the same information the rest of us had. And I still saw this behavior generally. There were of course exceptions. Interestingly the biggest exceptions were ones that had at some point lived and worked in the USA, and then had returned to their home country for some reason or another. > I have…
AI is the popular cover excuse for layoffs. I can’t think of a single job that modern AI could easily replace.
I can think of a handful of people I work with who could be replaced by LLM. The hallucinations would be less frequent than the screw-ups the current humans make. It could at least consolidate 5 of those people into 1 with increased efficiency.
I could consolidate those 5 with a trained chimp, but it wouldnt mean that chimps are about to overthrow mankind.
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
Let's read the paper instead: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/... It presents a difference-in-differences ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences ) design that exploits staggered adoption of generative AI to estimate the causal effect on productivity. It compares headcount over time by age group across several occupations, showing significant differentials across age grou…
Interesting technique, that DID. But it assumes the non treatment factors would affect both the treatment group and control group equally, that the effect would scale linearly. If the treatment group was more exposed to the non-treatment factors, then an increase could account for a larger difference than the one seem at time 1. Idk which other industry they used as the controll group but interest rates could have a superlinear effect on tech as compared to on that, so the difference of difference would be explained by the non-treatment factor too
This past year, I’ve seen a lot of entry-level jobs quietly disappear. It’s not that people are getting laid off, it’s that no one’s hiring beginners anymore. What’s really missing isn’t just the jobs, it’s the chance to grow. If there’s nowhere to start, how are new people supposed to get in and learn?
Sadly, they will just have to try harder. It is still doable especially for an American, and I'm not a fan of these doomsayers' prophesying. There is still hope because TikTok and video games are putting most young people in a trance.
TikTok and video games are also a more viable path to making $100,000 a month than any other professional path.
High interest rates + tariff terror -> less investment -> less jobs But let's blame AI
Is there some central authority that’s telling people to blame this all on AI, or how is everyone reaching this conclusion and ignoring the other obvious factors you stated?
It doesnt need to be a conspiracy. Incentives allign sometimes. Alot of people are invested in AI replacing jobs and it would be nice for them if the buzz was that it is actually the case
You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI, why it's almost exclusively impacting entry-level positions (with senior positions steady or growing), and why controlling for broad economic conditions failed to correct this. I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.
> You really do have to account for why this is mainly happening in industries that are adopting AI Correlation is not causation. The original research paper does not prove a connection. > I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs. They are nonetheless subject to publish or perish pressure and have strong incentives to draw publishable attention-gr…
> I doubt very much that these three Stanford professors would be blindsided by the concept of rates and tarriffs.
Digital Economy Lab and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence
I fully expect that these professors would be blindsided by even the most rudimentary real world economics.
It doesn't have to replace people on a one-for-one basis to cause job losses. Let's say LLMs make your developers 50% more efficient. Doesn't it stand to reason you can lay off the lowest performing 33% and get the same amount (or more) of work?
No, it does not stand, because you think linearly. Companies can't simply drop 33% of employees because there is competition. If competition uses both humans and AI they will get more value from both. No AI has sufficient autonomy or capability to be held accountable for its mistakes. There is less upswing in reducing costs than in increasing profits. Companies want to increase profits actually, not just reduce costs…
Think about Meta. A simple example is Metaverse. Mistakes and competition? Then, look at their market capitalization over the last three years.
Sadly, they will just have to try harder. It is still doable especially for an American, and I'm not a fan of these doomsayers' prophesying. There is still hope because TikTok and video games are putting most young people in a trance.
TikTok and video games are also a more viable path to making $100,000 a month than any other professional path.
It is a career path, but it 1) is a path that only works for a small amount of people, most people don't earn anything like that 2) requires a special kind of personality and set of skills 3) is subject to the whim of algorithms 4) requires brand building over time but can be destroyed overnight for many reasons. Most "regular" jobs are much more stable.