Gen Z Can't Compete With AI
Nothing makes me feel older than Gen Z marching their way into the job market. Poor kids. However, a recent study has suggested that their tender careers will have a far harder time getting off the ground than ours. Despite what much of the media says, this has little to do with work generational work ethic. In fact, some studies have shown the opposite. Instead, it is because AI is taking their first-rung-of-the-ladder entry-level jobs. A recent study asked 800 hiring managers if they would be making lay-offs due to AI replacing jobs. 78% confirmed they would be! All of these soon-to-be-gone jobs were graduate entry-level, such as research, data entry, customer service, and general office assistance. While 23% of these companies stated that less than 3% of their graduate workforce would be laid off due to AI, 11 confirmed that they planned to cut 15 to 30% of their graduate jobs! Only 22 managers stated that graduates were safe from lay-offs due to AI. So, the question has to be asked: Is AI starting to take over the job market? Or is there more to this situation?
Before we dive in, I feel we have to take a second to truly understand the impact this will potentially have on Gen Z. Their parents either directly experienced the 2008 crash or were entering the job market just after. As such, their trust in the economy and corporations is already quite dented. They are also painfully aware that the idea of them ever owning a house is dependent mainly on how their lottery tickets go. They are also very aware of the fact they will have to face the economic and environmental effects of climate change. As such, it’s no surprise that many studies have indicated that Gen Z expects to have to work far harder than Millennials to afford a similar quality of life. So the fact the beginner jobs which could nurture them to fruitful careers are being taken away is yet another kick in the proverbial dick for this already beaten-down generation.
Especially when you consider that they are exponentially better at these jobs than AI. Let me explain.
I feel like I talk about this over and over again at the moment, but AI cannot entirely replace a human worker, and Amazon’s “just walk out” grocery stores are a perfect example of this. In these stores, an AI would track customers around the store, and aided by shelf sensors, it would tot up what items the customer has taken. This way, rather than going to a checkout, the customer can simply walk out with the goods, and their Amazon account/card will be charged for what they have taken by the AI. This is a simple, constrained AI with no complex robotics, very few variables, incredibly obvious rules, and exceptionally easy-to-execute tasks. In theory, it should be easy to make it work flawlessly and render the entry-level cashier job obsolete. Yet, the AI got it so wrong so often that Amazon had to hire a small army of remote workers to monitor and correct it. The cost of hiring these AI nannies became so expensive that Amazon ultimately dropped the “just walk out” concept.
Cruise’s self-driving cars have a similar problem, requiring remote workers to intervene and ensure the cars are driving safely every few miles.
Now, taxi driver and cashier are not graduate entry-level jobs. They are somewhere between unskilled work and graduate entry-level jobs. For example, the data entry and research jobs detailed by the study require far more executive decision-making and potentially have much more severe implications down the line. If research, data collection, or data analysis is done incorrectly, these companies could lose millions. As someone who had one of these jobs, I can attest to this. So, if AI can’t displace these objectively easier jobs, how on earth can it possibly hope to replace these graduate jobs?
This is precisely why the Harvard Business Review, which is regarded as the source for business managerial guidance, has repeatedly stated that AI should be used to support human workers, not replace them. They found that AI can’t make basic decisions reliably enough to be left to its own devices. Instead, it should be used to augment a worker. For example, a graduate job involving research could have an AI-powered research tool to help them become more efficient.
You might think this flies in the face of the first study, but it doesn’t. The first study has a smoking gun that alludes to the Harvard Business Reviews’s findings.
You see, it’s about managers looking to replace jobs with AI, not managers that have. As we have seen time and time again, AI in theory is very different from AI in practice. Take a recent MIT study that found that human workers were cheaper than AI in 77% of cases, and even in the scenarios in which AI was cheaper, it still required human observation and assistance to function correctly. In other words, these managers might blindly walk into a trap, and their business will face increasing costs and decreasing productivity.
So, in the short term, it seems we might see a slight reduction in the number of graduate jobs as these misinformed managers jump on the AI bandwagon. However, in the long term, those jobs should be safe from AI, particularly as AI development is hitting a severe issue with rapidly diminishing returns, and there is no current way to reduce its extortionate costs, so it isn’t like it can catch up and overtake the Gen Z workers. In fact, the number of graduate-level jobs might grow massively over the years. Numerous studies have shown that if AI is deployed correctly and efficiently (i.e. augmenting workers, not replacing them), it can create a net gain in jobs, as demand for AI specialist programmers, specialist AI installers, AI technicians and AI supervisors increases, and each one of these positions will create entry-level graduate jobs.
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Sources: Intelligent, Indy100, Will Lockett, Planet Earth & Beyond, HBR, HBR, Euro News, Bloomberg