Artificial Intelligence’s Effect on Getting Jobs – The Reverse of What Many Expected?

Something often mentioned these past two-plus years of intense AI news has been what it will do to employment.  First, many were claiming that a massive shedding of office jobs was imminent, which was premature at best.  How about more recently?

“I’m a LinkedIn Executive.  I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking.”  So said Aneesh Raman in the May 19^th New York Times.  His case was that “there are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers.”  That’s nothing new – such positions have been getting higher for decades, from my onetime father-in-law starting his illustrious pharmaceutical career in the 1950s by sweeping up the lab, through the steady attrition of what were once called “secretaries” at AT&T through at least the 1990s, and continuing with more and more bottom-level positions requiring excellent computer user skills this century.  Raman talked about “advanced coding tools” replacing “writing simple code and debugging,” and similar things happening with document review at law firms and “automated customer service tools” at “retailers.”  True, these trends are coinciding with poorer employment rates for new college graduates, but he said “we haven’t seen definitive evidence that A.I. is the reason for the shaky entry-level job market.”  The author also failed to mention that even if we “reimagine (entry-level work) entirely,” there will be fewer such positions.

Next, Leif Weatherby’s exposition that “A.I. Killed the Math Brain” (The New York Times, June 2^nd), that “the largest problem… is not the college essay, the novel or the office memo.  It’s computer code.”  Tracking with Raman, he noted “that at major A.I. companies, the hiring rate for software engineering jobs have (sic) fallen over the course of 2024 from a high of about 3,000 per month to near zero.”  He recommended that “young students… study language and mathematics,” to be able to audit AI output, which would be “also a way to deepen our humanity in the face of these strange machines we have built, and to understand them.”

The same events, with an additional cause, were described by Paul Davidson in USA Today’s June 5^th “Tech job openings vanish as AI, tariffs change hiring landscape.”  In a different view from the first piece, “AI… is increasingly prompting technology companies to hire fewer recent college graduates and lay off more employees, according to economists and staffing firms.”  Per the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary, we have still been gaining plenty of jobs, but “from April 2022 to March 2025, the unemployment rate for recent college grads – aged 22 to 27 – shot up from 3.9% to 5.8%,” compared with only 3.7% to 4.0% for everyone.

On the other side, we saw “A.I. Might Take Your Job.  Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You” (Robert Capps, The New York Times, June 17^th).  The author dispensed with AI being ready to write news stories, as “in freelance journalism… you aren’t just being paid for the words you submit.  You’re being paid to be responsible for them:  the facts, the concepts, the fairness, the phrasing” (italics Capps’s), even though “commentators have become increasingly bleak about the future of human work in an A.I. world.”  He named, as his 22 positions, AI auditors, AI translators, trust authenticators, AI ethicists, legal guarantors, consistency coordinators, escalation officers, AI integrators, AI “plumbers,” AI assessors, integration specialists, AI trainers,  AI personality directors, drug-compliance optimizers, AI/human evaluation specialists, enhanced product designers, article designers, story designers, world designers, human resources designers, civil designers, and differentiation designers, all defined in the text.  Although we should ask how many of these will be needed, AI’s deficiencies will indeed call for many to mop up for it – how about AI janitors?

“AI Is Taking Over Jobs; Is Yours at Risk?” (Autumn Spredemann, The Epoch Times, June 17^th).  Unfortunately vague about events in the past, expected in the immediate future, and projected by 2030, the author still clearly claimed that positions already losing headcount included 4,000 in May 2023, and “26 percent of illustrators and 36 percent of translators had already lost work because of generative AI.”

Last, “A ‘White-Collar Blood Bath’ Doesn’t Have to Be Our Fate” (Tim Wu, The New York Times, June 24^th).  Wu had been hearing “a lot of talk in recent weeks about” such a thing, “a scenario in the near future in which many college-educated workers are replaced by artificial intelligence programs that do their jobs faster and better.”  He said it wouldn’t be determined by “fate,” if “companies like Anthropic and Open AI” decide to use their products to enhance instead of supplant workers.  However, since “any technology – from the stone ax onward – replaces some human work in the course of augmenting it,” we will not end lost jobs with any AI-using strategy.

What’s unexpected here?  Until such problems as AI hallucinations somehow go away, the old 2023-ish idea that we will lose great masses of clerical and nontechnical office jobs won’t materialize.  It’s on the technical front now.  It may seem ironic that a product of oversold and overly-beloved STEM work may be the thing to knock its other opportunities off their pedestal, but that’s what we’re looking at now.  We are well and indefinitely into a time, per Weatherby, “in which a computer science degree is no longer a guarantee of a job.”  No matter where AI goes from here, that will continue, and we need to accept it.  Perhaps, also as Weatherby said, we need to bring back the career value of the liberal arts – even in our technology-soaked world.  Don’t rule that out.