I recently read the Future of Jobs Report - 2025 and found the results very interesting. It seems that the future job market is going to place a higher emphasis on AI and machine learning jobs, which would require our current populace to upskill away from automatable jobs and into higher-skill jobs. The Future of Jobs report only projects about five years into the future. While the optimists may conclude that AI will eventually replace large swathes of the labor force, what do you all think will happen in the next five years? Will we see a strengthening or shrinking labor force, and how will it be distributed across different countries and economies?
I can say for more economically developed countries, its going to have a shrinking impact on the job market, compounding on the issues now.
Considering how bad the current job market is for most entry-level positions, and CEO’s and Hiring Managers clearly stating:
“Coupled with what AI can offer now, there are few reasons left to hire graduates for many positions, which is reflected in recent [labour market] reports.”[The Guardian: ‘I’ve £90k in student debt – for what?’ Graduates share their job-hunting woes amid the AI fallout]
This is compounded with the following:
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Graduate students and entry-level roles that would establish people in industries are disappearing, making it nearly impossible for new graduates to begin their careers.
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Base-level careers generally make up the bulk of the modern economy and are not as efficient as automated systems in terms of gross production and cost, with the only possible advantage being accuracy, but even that is rare. The job market has been irreparably damaged.
And as for :
This is a massive issue, as if there are very few entry-level roles, upskilling to higher skill jobs will not be a reasonable solution, because there are only so many roles that can be this specialised. Furthermore, this logic is reductive as when industries moved away, as in Britain in the 80s, many areas became massively impoverished, even today. This will leave many people behind, and without a support system outside of work, will massively increase poverty. Furthermore, as employers refuse to train new recruits makes filling these high skill roles harder and will leave massive shortages.
It will massively shrink the labour force, especially in more economically developed countries, and without plans to mitigate this, will result in mass poverty. If AI is to take these roles, then there needs to be a push away from work being the main form of income in these more economically developed countries.
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Hey Adam! Thank you for your insightful reply.
I think there are a few points I’d like to make:
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The current state of the job market isn’t yet feeling much of an impact from AI. We can see this from Pew Research, where the most displaced industry is self-serve kiosks at just over 6% using AI.
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A lot of what’s causing a tough labor market for new grads right now is the reluctance of business to fund expanding economic policy in the US. With federal reserve rates up over 4%, plus the fallout from covid, hiring is slow.
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For upskilling, I’m not so much suggesting that the unskilled become AI developers. Instead, everyone takes one step up - the people that are CS developers now might step into those roles, while the freelance and self-taught developers take their roles, and somewhere down the line, maybe a barista becomes a solar panel installer.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of potential for fallout - but I think that a lot has changed since the '80s, and mass poverty because of AI is unlikely in the next five years. But let me know what you think, thanks!
That’s a great point. Sure, I think we’ll see a shift rather than a shrinkage because AI is likely to automate repetitive tasks but let’s not forget it is also creating demand for roles in AI oversight, ethics, and engineering. The key challenge is ensuring equitable upskilling so developing economies aren’t disproportionately affected.
keatonzang,
I think one of the biggets challenges AI brings is to educators. The status quo is gone. Educators are scrambling to adapt. I saw it first hand when I finished my BA four months ago.
Educators in some fields may have a better idea than in others, but I have many doubts.
In any case, it only makes sense that grads feel the painful, hard brunt the AI takeover. After all, they are newcomers.
By the way, here’s one of many events that put the ‘new’ norm into perspective. Goldman Sachs has recruited an AI Software Engineer. Sacks’s CIO, Marco Argenti, says the plan is to ‘augment’ the workforce such that the AI Software Engineer will do work on behalf of more than 10,000 humans. Morever, he says the number of AI Software Engineers could go up from hundreds to thousands (Hatmaker, 2025, para. 1).
Citation:
Hatmaker, T. (2025, July 11). Meet Devin: Goldman Sachs’s new AI software engineer that never sleeps. Fast Company.
Oof, yeah, education is a good point - I was in college when ChatGPT 3 was first released, and it definitely shook the market. I mean, students were using it en masse to write their papers, do their homework, et cetera. In this case, the educators are the ones playing catch-up in order to try and stay on top of it. Do you all think they’ll ever get the lead?