JOEL KOTKIN: AI is killing jobs and fuelling campus radicalism.
Today we may again be creating an assertive and angry class — as evidenced in the recent LA riots and the pro-Palestine protests on US campuses over the last year and a half — made up of degree holders. We can see this in recent reports that show the job market getting tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are those professionals on the “soft” side of the economy (finance, accounting, law, coding) whose jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence.
These industries tend to have a higher proportion of humanities graduates and countries in the West more generally have a problem with elite overproduction. As AI grows, there won’t be enough jobs to go round, and even if those graduates do get a job, their employers, with so many candidates to choose from, won’t pay well.
Related: The Coming “Symbolic Analyst” Meltdown. “As Eric Hoffer wrote, ‘Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.'”