AI Reality Check: Is AI Stealing Entry-Level Jobs?

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal published an article with an alarming headline, AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates. It then goes on to say, companies have long leaned on entry level workers to do grunt work that doubles as on the duty training. Now ChatGPT and other bots can do many of these chores. Now this idea that young people are having a particularly hard time finding jobs and that this is due in part to AI soon took off and became conventional wisdom. Variations of this claim have been cited ever since. Now look, this belief is starting to have a real impact. Just last week, Axios wrote an article that was titled AI is Making College Students Change Majors, and it cited a survey that showed sixteen percent of currently enrolled college students have changed their studies due to concerns about AI. That number jumps to twenty five percent when you consider students who are studying technology, which is all to say, if you've been reading AI coverage recently, you've probably encountered these type of claims many times. But are they true? Today, we're gonna look for some measured answers. I'm Cal Newport, and this is the AI reality check. Alright. So the question we're looking at today, is AI reducing the market for entry level jobs? Now I'm not an economist, but fortunately for our purposes, multiple economists have weighed in recently on this claim about AI stealing entry level jobs. And here's the thing, they're not that impressed. Alright. I wanna start, with someone named Torsten Slock, who is the chief economist at Apollo Global Management. Now last week, he published a newsletter that was titled busting the AI youth unemployment myth. Alright? Now in this article, he has two different charts that he put together, both of them drawing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I'll put the the first chart up here on the screen. Okay. So this is looking at the unemployment rate from the mid nineteen nineties until today, and it shows two lines. One for all people 16 years and older, and others for just twenty to twenty four year olds. So he's looking at, are young people having a particularly hard time with unemployment right now? And what you see is, well, no. The overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rate for young people seems to be moving, roughly with the same trends. Alright. Here's how Slock summarizes this chart. The data does not show any sign that unemployment is stronger that unemployment among younger workers is structurally higher because of AI. Okay. Now a common critique that you might hear here, is that it depends what type of young people we're talking about. Right? It's really young people with college degrees that should really be seeing their their, jobs being stolen by AI because AI automation is more aimed at white collar jobs than non white collar jobs. So with this critique …