The most reassuring argument about AI and jobs quietly explains why Gen Z can’t get one
Fortune – Tech
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Summary
Smart people disagree on the AI job apocalypse, and even the prophets of white-collar doom—Dario Amodei and Sam Altman—have walked back their predictions. It also explains why the entry-level market hiring struggle is painfully real. In a piece published earlier this month, the company cited two economic concepts: the “lump of labor fallacy” and the Jevons Paradox. The “ lump of labor fallacy ” was coined by English economist David Frederick Schloss in 1891, as he noted that many workers and employers believed there was a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy. This perfectly fits the pattern of a labor market where the entry-level workers who do one task at a time struggle to get hired, and the rest of the AI jobpocalypse just doesn’t really show up in the data. The entry-level job market is the worst it has been in 37 years . A Stanford study found workers aged 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations experienced a 13% drop in employment since 2022. Legal teams are growing, it notes, by hiring professionals who can validate AI outputs and focus on higher-value strategic work. It also describes a profession that has decoupled entry-level hiring from its own growth. PwC calls this “ seniorization ,” based off an analysis of more than 1 billion job postings.
From the source
Smart people disagree on the AI job apocalypse, and even the prophets of white-collar doom—Dario Amodei and Sam Altman—have walked back their predictions. But the best explanation for why AI won’t kill off jobs across the economy comes, perhaps unexpectedly, from a Dutch software company that sells its products to law firms. It also explains why the entry-level market hiring struggle is painfully real. Wolters Kluwer is a 183-year-old Dutch information services company that sells AI-powered software to law firms. In a piece published earlier this month, the company cited two economic concepts: the “lump of labor fallacy” and the Jevons Paradox. The “ lump of labor fallacy ” was coined by English economist David Frederick Schloss in 1891, as he noted that many workers and employers believed there was a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy. You can see this everywhere over the past four years, even among the AI kingpins such as Amodei and Altman, as they warned that if AI elimin
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