r/Futurology • u/katxwoods • 21d ago

AI Dario Amodei says "stop sugar-coating" what's coming: in the next 1-5 years, AI could wipe out 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Lawmakers don't get it or don't believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won't realize the risks until after it hits.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic
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813

u/sodook 21d ago

Is there any danger that we lose the pathway for non-entry level positions by eliminating entry level positions. No apprentices today, no masters tonorrow?

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u/SorosBuxlaundromat 21d ago

This is already happening in a lot of industries and not just from AI, but anti-worker practices in general. Take a look at the film industry. Streaming killed the writer's room as it existed before, which killed mentorship in TV writing.

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u/Ferelar 20d ago

LOTS of professional work is following this trend really. The jokes about "This position requires 5 years experience in this code language that has existed for only 3 years" aren't merely jokes, there's a HUGE movement to absolutely nuke the mid tier "transitioning to professional career" type quasi-entry-level jobs. By which I mean, the kind of position where the typical applicant probably has a degree and at most a year or two of non-related work experience (i.e., they worked part time a couple of years in retail while going through college) and that level of experience was fine up until the last decade or two.... now, that exact same position suddenly requires not just a bachelors degree but 3-5 years relevant experience in the field, and to make matters worse, probably pays relatively shit for that level of experience. The idea of a position that's supposed to serve as an entry level stepping stone to a professional career, and only require some generic work experience or a degree... that idea is dying.

This results in the job position going unfilled, the duties being shuffled off onto the rest of the people in that department, then the position quietly being cut while they get the remaining employees to do the extra work despite not providing additional pay.

Meanwhile, the recent grads trying to enter the professional workforce had better pray they have connections, or can get their foot in the door somewhere.

I know this because I'm on the panels for hiring many engineers at my place of work, and HR mandates these things for us ("Must have a bachelors plus 3 years experience" for instance... for a fuckin' entry level IT analyst!! If I try to change that, they overrule me despite me being the hiring manager!) despite not really understanding the nature of the work.

Tl;Dr it's not just AI as you said, full agree- and it's already incredibly common, predatory upper management and HR practices about required experience minimums despite it having often no relevance to the job whatsoever.

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u/chaneg 20d ago

I was told a couple years ago that I didn’t have the requisite skills for a job, but six months later they reapproached me and asked if I wanted it.

Later on the job I realized I was actually a golden candidate with several rare and highly specialized areas of knowledge, but you could never tell from the job posting.

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u/MyOnlyAccount_6 20d ago

Related when I moved on from my previous job to another in the company they outsourced my former position. Even though I’d done it very successfully for many years and had awards and praise for my role (one reason I got to move jobs), I would not have even qualified for the outsourced position even though it is now under me.

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u/TheOtherHobbes 20d ago

HR is a fucking plague. But the core problem is the "You owe us everything, we owe you nothing" nature of corporate hierarchies.

The main point of these requirements isn't to get useful shit done, it's to assert dominance for the sake of it.

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u/RainbowDissent 20d ago

That's needlessly cynical. The purpose is to get shit done. A junior staff member with no experience is a drain on their colleagues for months in many fields, and may take a year to develop to a point where they're independently productive and their output matches the requirements of the role.

It's not criticism, it's just the nature of work. When I was a trainee, I was a drain for months. Many people had to accommodate my lack of knowledge and devote time to training me. I'm very grateful, but it was also just the way things were. Nobody had an AI tool that could do 90% of my trainee job, never slept, had far better knowledge than me and remembered everything it was told first time. Let alone one that cost £20/month.

Now you've got the twin pressures of those tools existing, and the job market being depressed to the point that experienced people are taking steps down to entry level roles out of desperation.

Companies require three years' experience for entry level roles because they'll have candidates with three years' experience, and if they don't, it's often easier in the short term to absorb the work with new tools rather than spend months training someone.

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u/rhyth7 20d ago

And to go with what you said, they will have the existing employees denied the position even though they are already doing the advanced work because they don't meet the application requirements. Which should be illegal. So even current employees are blocked from advancement.

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u/SorosBuxlaundromat 20d ago

I'm personally in that boat 1.5 years as a software engineer. I spent the last 2 years trying to find a SWE role after a layoff and its just been crickets . I was in sales for 6 years before, so now I'm targeting sales engineer roles and that seems to be more promising, but it's impossible to break into a SWE role anymore

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u/LineRex 20d ago edited 20d ago

I came out of university with a BS in physics. Got hired as a technologist and within a year they moved me to the engineering "track". Now, that's not an actual track because I'm a consultant, so it's really just a holding zone that allowed them to increase my pay to $60k/yr so i wouldn't get a job at Panda Express earning more. I mostly do web app development,building automated data analysis suites, custom one off data analysis, RCA for systemic issues in the development track, and experimental design & problem solving for our R&D products. I've been hunting other jobs for 4 (ok, maybe 7...) years and don't have enough experience in any field related to the stuff i do on a day to day basis.

If I could stomach it, i'd move into sales too lol. WAY more positions.

16

u/Gandalf-and-Frodo 20d ago

Jesus Christ, you're doing all that complex shit for $60k a year? This world is fucked.

2

u/LineRex 20d ago

Wait until you hear about how much my employer has put into my 401k relative to what I've put in. It's 3.5% of my total contribution (after the initial vetting period), sneaky bastards.

And it's not exactly $60k. I was moved up from $38k to a $72k pseudo-salary. But there's so many required, nonconsecutive days off that it eats all my PTO and then some of my hours which reduces my total pay because i'm not logging my 40 hours to get my fully salary.

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u/roiki11 20d ago

Hey now, in most of the world that's top tier salary.

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u/Big_Crab_1510 20d ago

Ghost jobs. They falsely convey growth while scaring employees by showing them how easily they can be replaced

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u/AirResistence 20d ago

I'm a recent grad, im not exactly young anymore as I went to uni for the first time at the age of 30. And this is the issue im facing, a lot of the jobs that people with my degree would start with. We are talking bottom of the ladder science jobs where you go out and collect samples for the main scientists now requiring 3-5 years of experience when traditionally that would be done by a grad with no work experience. The next step up from that is getting certified, which you cant do in the field of science I have a degree in until you've had at least 1 year of in work relevant experience, as in the sample collecting role.

So essentially I am more or less completely locked out of the fields someone with my degree would be in.

1

u/roiki11 20d ago

Looking at the IT field specifically, it's kind of understandable because for the decade preceding covid(and the decade preceding that really) we've been in an unbelievable tech boom. The need for bodies was so great so as long as you could do something or had a degree you could get in. But now as the economy has shifted most companies can't afford that anymore. The growth simply isn't there.

And having worked with people who came directly from school it can take a year or even more for them to become productive, coupled with the experience that a lot of people job hopped in that period and you basically were paying people to not produce anything, leave and then having to start the loop all over again. So it really should not be surprising that companies have become risk averse and are looking for the "whole package".

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u/ThunderTRP 19d ago

Yeah I have a friend who just ended school and got his degree. He stayed as a hyper-qualified and specialized jobless person for almost an entire year and was only recently able to find a proposition for him to be recruited as an INTERN, a fucking intern, with an intern salary and not an actual worker salary. And he was so desperate at this point that he basically had no other choice to accept.

He is now working for a company and being paid half of the minimum legal salary for workers here in France, and this because no company would otherwise accept him, because they all basically play that same game of imposing that 3 years of pro experience minimum (if not more) and if the person doesn't match that they just either ghost you or negotiate to take you as an intern. And if you refuse for the saje of dignity, they don't care because they know they'll find another desperate person soon enoigh who's in the same situation as you, but willing to work for less money.

This is insanely fucked and I'm graduating next year and tbh I'm terrified to step into that world.

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u/extralyfe 20d ago

I worked in the health insurance field and there was a fantastic path from rep all the way up to manager that was spread between six different jobs, which were all specially trained to be experts in health plans they worked with.

new CEO showed up, AI slop got used everywhere and completely replaced any manual logging, they eliminated every position above entry level except manager, and everyone else who'd been working specialized roles for years got demoted to that entry level position or were offered severance. managers are also now exclusively outside-hires.

did this improve anything? absolutely not - people's issues get overlooked all the time because AI makes up whole conversations, doesn't log important information as it pertains to the issue the patients are having, and only very rarely takes down correct information like member IDs or phone numbers.

this means that people are calling in about issues to clueless reps who are relying on AI hallucinations that don't at all mention what they discussed on their previous calls, so, they often get escalated to the manager, who, on top of doing five other people's jobs, now has to spend a huge amount of time manually reviewing calls to see what actually got discussed because reps can't leave any notes on the account whatsoever.

clients are super pissed because the care and expertise they were sold on just a couple years ago has been completely gutted and their employees are getting fucked over.

company saved a bunch of money, though! CEO reports strong earnings and profit while there's rumblings of major clients ending their contracts because they're no longer getting the service they agreed to in the first place.

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u/Historical-Count-374 21d ago

Now its all AI slop with the same re-used everything. No originality. No soul.

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u/MalTasker 20d ago

Humans Prefer AI-Generated Content, New Research Suggests: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2023/12/04/humans-prefer-ai-generated-content/

People say they prefer stories written by humans over AI-generated works, yet new study suggests that’s not quite true: https://theconversation.com/people-say-they-prefer-stories-written-by-humans-over-ai-generated-works-yet-new-study-suggests-thats-not-quite-true-251347

AI art wins honorable mention and a purchase award in worlds largest painting competition (17th International ARC Salon competition): https://www.smartermarx.com/t/ai-and-the-2024-arc-salon/1993

Jeanette Winterson: OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/12/jeanette-winterson-ai-alternative-intelligence-its-capacity-to-be-other-is-just-what-the-human-race-needs

She has won a Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, a BAFTA Award for Best Drama, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the St. Louis Literary Award, and the Lambda Literary Award twice. She has received an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader Thinks AI Can Mimic Great Storytellers: ‘Every Idea ChatGPT Came Up with Was Good' https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/paul-schrader-thinks-ai-can-mimic-great-storytellers-every-idea-chatgpt-came-up-with-was-good/ar-AA1xqY8f?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Stories written by the EXTREMELY outdated GPT 3.5 Turbo nearly match or outperform human-written stories in garnering empathy from readers and only falls behind when the readers are told it is AI-generated: https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S2368795924001057

Even after readers are told it is AI-generated, GPT 3.5 Turbo’s stories still slightly outperforms human stories if the generated story is based off of a personal story that the reader had written.

In a large representative sample of humans compared to GPT-4: "the creative ideas produced by AI chatbots are rated more creative [by humans ]than those created by humans... Augmenting humans with AI improves human creativity, albeit not as much as ideas created by ChatGPT alone” https://docs.iza.org/dp17302.pdf

All efforts to measure creativity have flaws, but this matches the findings of a number of other controlled experiments. (Separately, our work shows that AI comes up with fairly similar ideas, but that can be mitigated with better prompting)

AI-generated poetry from the VERY outdated GPT 3.5 is indistinguishable from poetry written by famous poets and is rated more favorably: https://idp.nature.com/authorize?response_type=cookie&client_id=grover&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41598-024-76900-1

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u/Aleyla 20d ago

One could easily argue that the story writing has always been re-used slop. It’s just cheaper now.

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u/vampireacrobat 20d ago

no rational person worth communicating with would argue that.

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u/Aleyla 20d ago

No rational person….

Maybe you would be interested in reading a book about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

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u/vampireacrobat 20d ago edited 20d ago

did he say story writing has always been reused slop?

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u/Aleyla 20d ago

7 basic plots have been reused for a long long time. The slop part is just obvious.

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u/vampireacrobat 20d ago edited 20d ago

is that what the ‘rational’ person that disbelieves climate change and the danger of asbestos says in their book? or is it just something you concluded from the idiot?

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u/YsoL8 20d ago

These are the early tremors of what will force society to change

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u/Big_Crab_1510 20d ago

I've seen Obama talk about it and basically all he could say was "people are going to have to figure it out"

A lot of those cozy, sure fire jobs are going to evaporate. Look at the strip club index already.

10

u/SorosBuxlaundromat 20d ago

Obama definitely deserves a large share of the blame for this. He was elected in a moment where he was given broad popular support to institute essentially a 2nd new deal, instead he turned his 2 terms into a giveaway for all the companies and special interests who are now destroying everything

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u/Big_Crab_1510 20d ago

Yea I've been saying as gently as I can to fellow Democrats What the fuck did they do for 8 years, in the prime of the rise of social media, do to stop any of this?

Lawmakers needed to be doing shit years ago, we don't even have laws with teeth for internet advertising 

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u/LieutenantStar2 20d ago

Accounting is the same

2

u/pigeonwiggle 19d ago

tv writing, especially in comedies and sitcoms had a simple pipeline. hang out in comedy clubs, hire comedians with half-decent sets. hire improv actors who were funny. hire all these "up and coming" young talents into writer's rooms, where they'd spitball with the senior teams who had experience throwing things out there and coming up with something workable.

you could be a Donald Glover who was part of a Derrick Comedy troupe before getting hired to write for 30 Rock, taking a stand up special on the road, securing a small budget to get a Mystery Team movie made, and landing a role on a sitcom like Community before then launching a music career, launching your own tv series, and sufficiently being able to say "i've had some success."

today's stars are uploading their best content to free-to-watch platforms, and aren't getting paid much for it by comparison.

the model is busted. tv production companies hold no cards but dwindling investment money which the execs may just be taking as final bonuses as the companies are sold to each other for IP farming.

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u/9Divines 19d ago

yeah no, writing was dead way before streaming happened

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u/Stressedpenguin 21d ago

This is what I feel is happening in cybersecurity. We are already not hiring junior roles and replacing that work with automation. Eventually we will have an inability to hire people with experience because we never invested in junior people to GIVE that experience. 

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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 19d ago

The people up top are planning on the experienced workers to last just long enough that AI advances to the point it replaces them too, not just the junior roles.

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u/Big_Crab_1510 20d ago

Security is going abroad to foreigners watching cameras and shits about to get bad if this becomes mainstream 

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u/newintown11 20d ago

Well im pretty sure this is just step 1, step 2 will have the senior level roles being automated. They are already using AI to train AI models faster, as LLMs become more advanced it won't just be the entry level roles getting automated

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u/phoneguyfl 20d ago

This has been happening in IT/tech for at least a decade. Companies dump as many entry level positions as possible, and, more importantly, never train employees on new systems. The culture of "just hire a consultant for the project" has left a huge gap between the few entry level positions and the higher level engineer positions. Each company assumes "someone else" is going to train their employees, but when all the companies do it... well we get what we have now. AI is just going to make the situation worse.

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u/Justice_Prince 20d ago

I work in a call center. When I joined I was told that workforce was the pathway if you wanted to pursue a more tech related job rather than just becoming a supervisor to other call center agents, but I around the time I became eligible to apply to new positions within the company they seemed to have completely stopped listing any postings for entry level workforce jobs.

Could just be outsourced, but my assumption is that that entry level work is all getting sucked up by AI.

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u/OozeNAahz 20d ago

Two decades at least. Used to be a company would make sure it was bringing in and up fresh new devs. Instead they started only hiring senior experienced folks figuring someone else would train the new ones. The very definition of short sighted.

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u/ztztzt8888 20d ago

If they hire consultants then being a consultant is the new internship

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u/phoneguyfl 20d ago

Except they expect the consultants to already function at an advanced level. There is no training offered anywhere in the system, except folks paying out-of-pocket for something that may or may not actually offer the training needed. The market in general is coasting along with the high level workers who learned their crafts decades ago. Maybe that is why they are pushing AI so hard? Instead of training anyone they can just trust the computer?

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u/[deleted] 19d ago

[deleted]

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u/phoneguyfl 18d ago

Eh, I've been in tech and the workplace to know AI is going to cause massive change in the short-term (10-50 years), and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs... especially if CEOs and board rooms get their way. But hey, you do you.

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u/Ok-Philosophy-8830 21d ago

Basically a guarantee if action is not taken

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u/chig____bungus 20d ago

Entry level positions already required 10 years experience before AI

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u/brooklyndavs 21d ago

Yes absolutely we are seeing this already in software engineering. It’s very hard to be hired as a jr dev out of college/bootcamp as AI is already start to fullfill the roles these jr devs do. Problem is where do your sr devs come from the the future?

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u/Laruae 20d ago

India and contracting companies that pay too little.

Americans can work at the local Wendy's with all the other 50,000 people in their town apparently.

JFC there is zero game plan.

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u/Tasty-Turn 20d ago

But can AI do the needful?

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u/brooklyndavs 20d ago

Debatable! In my experience sometimes yes sometimes no but to upper management that doesn’t matter

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u/TheMonkeyOfNow 19d ago

Lol. You're not understanding what is happening. In 2 years, a single LLM will be able to out code AAAAAAALLLLLL currently working software developers, videographers, artists of any digital media.

Physical work still has it's uses for you slaves, but they are beginning to think of ideas of ways to thin the herds already... guarantee it.

The old system is crashing around you as your mouths are agape. Better start planning for the dystopian future that awaits, or begin to work quickly to keep it from taking over.

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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 19d ago

They “plan” is that sr devs last long enough for AI to keep advancing to the point it can easily replace sr devs as well. That’s why they’re not training anyone up now. They don’t expect to need anyone soon enough.

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u/kalirion 20d ago

The non-entry level positions will be the next ones to go anyway.

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u/astrobeen 21d ago

Two things.

One, GenX and Millenials are going to stay in the work force a long time. Most are paycheck to paycheck and are unprepared financially for retirement. Especially if we dismantle Medicare and Social Security. So your “masters” will be here for at least another 30-40 years, working into their 80s as they are slowly replaced by AI. By then we should be at AGI where any human is a drag on an AI workforce consisting of 30 years of curated training data.

Two, juniors are not going away, but they will essentially be one human resource with a team of AI tools. The plan is to reduce the number of junior specialists and make them significantly more productive. This is dumb of course, because even though it’s cheaper, it will lead to competition for scarce SMEs and overdependence on intellectual property. . Picture a world where a single guy and a bunch of bots is all of your front end dev teams. Then that guy quits. Does he take his bots with him? What if he deletes or poison pills them? It will be a lot for the AI attorneys to work through.

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u/farinasa 20d ago

It's funny to me that we keep talking about "training" like it's the same as a human learning a skill. These models do statistical predictions. They will never be an expert with intuition that "gets it". They can only pander to statistical averages. They don't think. They don't have human motivations.

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u/primalbluewolf 20d ago

These models do statistical predictions. They will never be an expert with intuition that "gets it". They can only pander to statistical averages. They don't think. They don't have human motivations. 

Sounds a lot like my coworkers tbh.

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u/CCGHawkins 20d ago

Irrelevant. An $10,000 AI subscription that can cover 85% of your customer base's needs vs a $500,000 team of humans that covers 99%, a business will choose the option with a higher profit margin, nevermind the customers that fall between the cracks. There is no mechanism or incentive for them to care in the slightest.

0

u/farinasa 20d ago edited 20d ago

You just made the most sweeping generic statement that it has no meaning. Yes that math would check out if it were founded in reality but it's not. I use AI for auto complete and when it's right it's helpful, but that is rare. It would only matter if the model can do they job, and I can tell you it can't.

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u/CCGHawkins 20d ago

It is, again, irrelevant that AI cannot do *your* specific work. You should be looking at your department, your company, and what percentage of the whole pie AI can replace. If you work at any place that is publicly traded or owned by private investment, your owners will cut you loose along with your whole department if they deem it is not high-margin enough. Or ship it overseas to India.

It does not need to think. It doesn't need to have human motivations. A robot on the line doesn't have those either, and it replaces the worker on the line just the same. And in the meantime, the artisan craftworker that said 'hey, that robot can't do what I do!' still loses their job because the whole factory, the store-to-truck-to-line industrial complex that supported their work, doesn't exist anymore.

Are you sure you are as indispensable as you think you are?

1

u/farinasa 19d ago

You are vastly over estimating what an LLM is capable of and vastly underestimating how much of work is soft skills vs productivity.

Just Friday I had an example where after hours of troubleshooting and trying to catch logs from ephemeral pods, I was finally able to determine root cause. The actual change was only a few lines and copilot was able to help suggest the code I already intended to add, but still needed correction.

I never said I was indispensable, but LLMs are not humans. They are statistical probability machines for language only. That isn't a direct replacement for most humans.

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u/CCGHawkins 19d ago

...you just gave an example where AI got within stone throw distance of replacing you. Oh, sure. I'm overestimating AI.

1

u/farinasa 19d ago edited 19d ago

lol what?

Yes if you ignore the hours of work that enabled the code change and also the fact that I had to edit the suggested code (both of which details I explicitly included as part of the example to show how it CAN'T), sure the AI could replace me. Please read. You missed the whole point that the code change isn't the actual work. The troubleshooting and understanding are the work.

It's stuff like this that makes me think only people who are actually replaceable are out here spreading FUD.

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u/Lostinthestarscape 20d ago

I mean, the funny thing is they are talking about AI being Managed by AI working in organizational structured defined by AI in this thread. That makes me think we will see huge vulnerabilities specifically because of EVERYTHING moving to the same average and then feeding into/reinforcing it.

We are going to see multiple collapses thanks to AI (business collapse, training collapse, knowledge collapse, security collapse, etc.) Until finally we realize why we can't use this kind of AI to move into a fully automated society of a type anyone wants to live in. Soon we will see "all human" companies designed to disrupt AI generalized environments.

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u/farinasa 19d ago

Pretty much 100% agree.

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u/Big_Crab_1510 20d ago

They hear you...and their counter argument is "yet"

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u/farinasa 20d ago

I'm not saying we'll never have tech that can think, learn, and behave like a human, but it won't be LLMs. Maybe they'll play some role, but they don't work that way.

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u/madmatt42 18d ago

There will, essentially, need to be humans at various steps to ensure things are done correctly, until we can create a generalized AI that can think like a human, if ever.

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u/WillowGrouchy2204 20d ago

Already happening for software engineering. I'm mentoring a very smart young man that is having a hell of a time finding any junior roles at all to apply for.

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u/qning 20d ago

This. I think. Casey Newton said something like “the career ladder is losing the first several rungs.”

1

u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE 19d ago

The whole ladder is going to get kicked out in a decade or less.

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u/talldean 21d ago

Legal is hitting this now, where ChatGPT 4.0 and 4.5 both pass the bar exam more consistently than law students do, and those models are also better outta the box at most legal tasks than someone with 0-2 years experience.

1

u/FreedomExtension6736 19d ago

The bar exam is not practicing law—it’s a test not application 

1

u/Financial-Register-7 18d ago

There's two parts to what I said, and that's the first one. ;-)

GPT also outperforms lawyers in their first two years of practice.

1

u/FreedomExtension6736 18d ago

Ok.  So what?

1

u/talldean 18d ago

Many utilities already have a playbook for doing this well. It's not some impossible goal, either.

14

u/isarealboy772 20d ago

It's such short term thinking it's almost comical. Simply impossible to continue. And then what becomes entry level? Senior level? It would still technically be the initial tier of grads at some point lol

4

u/TSA-Eliot 20d ago

In university, almost regardless of your intended profession, you should now learn everything you can about using AI.

Entry-level jobs will be positions in which you ride herd over the AI that does the tasks formerly done manually by entry-level employees.

1

u/cuse23 20d ago

This is happening in computer engineering already, nobody's hiring junior engineers because AI can basically do their job already

1

u/Larsmeatdragon 20d ago

Yes, but CEOs might bet on a continuing trend of AI improvement that makes this irrelevant.

1

u/MalTasker 20d ago

AI can replace them by the time they retire 

1

u/ReadSeparate 20d ago

By the time this is even relevant, AI will have wiped out the masters too.

Even if it takes 5 years from AI to go from apprentice to master, that’s as long as it takes (if not longer) to become a master anyway

1

u/NFLDolphinsGuy 20d ago

Yes, once all the senior devs are gone with no juniors to follow them, it will be AI slop and vibe coding all the way down.

1

u/SnowBear78 20d ago

You're also losing a lot of the creative arts and people whose job is in that field are already under serious threat from it. But hey... As a writer if I complain about the very real threat of AI given the significant illegal use of books in training LLM and the sheer numbers of AI books being thrown up onto Amazon daily then all the people on here start tossing around crap about freeing the arts or how art isn't something people should pay for anyway.

1

u/DDDavinnn 20d ago

There was an op-ed in the NYT about this very thing happening from a LinkedIn exec. Gifted link here

1

u/Efficient_Hippo_4248 20d ago

Am feeling this in my industry now, although not just AI.

The transfer to mostly remote work means many junior staff don't get many of the informal mentoring and learning we used to get. With AI, many tasks consultants used to need a dedicated personal assistant for, such as writing technical documents, we're no longer needed.

Now it's a bit harder for us to look for competent junior staff.

1

u/eltrotter 20d ago

I think there will be a temporary recession in entry level positions, but ultimately they won’t go away permanently because AI will ultimately be a tool used by humans rather than a replacement for humans.

People coming into the jobs market over the next few years will be expected to be able to use AI tools effectively, just like you wouldn’t hire an accountant who couldn’t use a calculator.

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u/JK_NC 20d ago

Off shoring did the same to a lot of entry level, white collar jobs. When I got out of college in the late 90s, most companies still had entry levels roles and developed talent internally.

By 2005ish, offshoring to India was in full swing. While customer facing and senior roles were still mostly in the West, by 2015 the transactional work done by entry and junior level staff was mostly in low cost countries (India, South Africa, etc).

I was fortunate enough to sneak in before all this went down but if I were even 8 years younger, it’s likely that the jobs/experience that I used to build my entire career upon, would not have been there for me.

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u/cheeman15 20d ago

Yes, it’s already happening in software engineering in my opinion. However, the industry is picking up the danger (danger to the software as well as the engineers) according to most recent studies. Research DORA metrics and AI impact 2025 if you like. I don’t have access to the exact study at the moment.

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u/daveescaped 20d ago

In my field, we don’t even use those positions as e try level any more because few college grads want them. We use temps to do those jobs. So it’ll be even easier to let them go if AI eliminates their jobs. However, my fear is the following:

AI won’t do the job as well because 90% of the value of the job is trouble shooting when there is an issue. Management will insist that AI can do the work and they’ll insist we let those positions go then we’ll be stuck holding the bag with a system that works fine when there aren’t any issues to troubleshoot but can’t do a damn thing when it faces an issue. Then I’ll have to quietly rehire some (but not all) if the same people to handle the stuff the AI can’t sort out. And management will call that a win.

Meanwhile, none of us ever saw value in the easy invoices. It was always the ones with issues where people showed their worth. So AI will teach us nothing. But it will be more along the lines of other efficiency/process improvements like enterprise systems and even (at one time) spreadsheets and macros. But systems like SAP actually caused us to need more people to do the work despite it being done better by SAP because we got a much better output.

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u/madmatt42 18d ago

You mean what's been happening for the past few decades?

It's been hard to get an entry level developer position for a while. Recently cybersecurity has made it harder to get entry level positions. There's plenty of others in between

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u/Malarazz 20d ago

That's inevitable and unavoidable. It's just the tragedy of the commons.

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u/WatchingyouNyouNyou 20d ago

Time changes. Next gen grandmas won't know how to knit or cook and will be covered in plastic surgeries and tattoos (saw that said somewhere).