'It's not going away': The Stanford economist who called the AI entry-level jobs crisis early has the receipts

Oh, splendid — another day, another data point confirming that young people are the canaries in the AI coal mine. Erik Brynjolfsson and his Stanford team have crunched 4.6 million worker records across 730 occupations and found that employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed jobs is shrinking at 3.8% per year. That's not a blip; that's a demographic cliff, and the 'receipts' are here for anyone still pretending this is just a productivity panic.

Brynjolfsson, the economist who's been banging this drum since before it was fashionable, now has the numbers to prove what everyone under 30 already knew: the entry-level rung has been kicked away. The study defines 'highly AI-exposed' as roles where machine learning could plausibly handle a chunk of the tasks — the sort of junior analyst, customer service, or data processing jobs that used to be the first step on the ladder. Now that ladder has been replaced by a trapdoor, and the '3.8% per year' decline is accelerating, because why hire a human when a GPT wrapper costs less than the HR software?

Of course, the tech industry's response will be a shiny 'reskilling initiative' that teaches undergrads how to prompt while the models learn to prompt themselves. The joke, as always, is on the entry-level worker who did everything right — studied, networked, took an internship — only to find that the career path was a mirage. "It's not going away," the title says. No, it's not. It's just getting cheaper and meaner. Cheers, lads.