Students fear AI is about to kill their future

After he graduated with a computer science degree in 2022, Robert Marsh “could get an interview basically anywhere”. Today, applying for jobs is a struggle.

“The complete and utter shape of everything is changing,” said Marsh, a 26-year-old software engineer based in Easton, Pennsylvania. “In almost every interview it’s kind of like: ‘Do we really need you?’”

Marsh is on the front lines of a new industrial revolution as AI washes over the labour market. Job opportunities for younger people in exposed industries are drying up, leaving many new graduates despondent and angry.

“My job prospects feel like they’re basically being taken away by a cabal of the world’s most wealthy and intelligent individuals,” said Marsh. “I just wanted to relax, have a nice career and maybe own a house. But there’s a conglomerate that’s seeing to it that I can’t have that.”

While the mass lay-offs or AI “jobpocalypse” many feared has yet to arrive, the technology is hoovering up work in some sectors that would previously have gone to entry-level people.

Among AI-exposed occupations such as coding and accountancy, employment is now 19 per cent lower than if it had kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-affected occupations, according to research from Stanford University. Experts say it is just the start.

“There’s something real going on,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “We call it canaries in the coal mine . . . We see this effect in a few areas initially and I would expect over time there is a good chance that it will spread.”

The advance of AI has been thrown into the spotlight amid stark warnings from industry leaders about its potential existential threat to humanity and fierce community blowback over the proliferation of electricity-guzzling data centres.

Warnings over the economic fallout have also mounted. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said last year that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push US unemployment to 10 to 20 per cent within one to five years.

“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 per cent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 per cent of people don’t have jobs,” Amodei told Axios, outlining one potential outcome. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”

Other tech oligarchs have been more dismissive. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year that if he were a 22-year-old graduate, he “would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history”.

“There’s never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new, to go invent something, to start a company,” he told the Huge If True podcast. In a decade, graduates could be “leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some kind of completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job”.

US President Donald Trump has dismissed calls from tech bosses to increase regulation and “pace the frontier”, arguing any slowdown in what he dubs “superintelligence” would cede ground to China.

But 200 miles from Washington, in the university town of Bethlehem and the surrounding Lehigh Valley, where the FT is carrying out a multiyear reporting project, the revolution’s first casualties are emerging. Young people fear they are being treated as collateral damage.

“We don’t know where we’re needed anymore,” said Chloe Leong, an economics student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. “It’s terrifying. If the entry-level jobs are getting cut . . . what base do we have to start at?”

A generation already rocked by the Covid-19 pandemic and locked out of the housing market are increasingly convinced that Silicon Valley billionaires are stacking the deck against them.

A Gallup poll this year found the number of 14-29-year-olds reporting to be “excited” or “hopeful” about AI was dwindling, while those who were “angry” or “anxious” were rising.

Leong completed her bachelors degree a year early with all the requisite résumé boxes ticked: vice-president of a national honour fraternity, co-founder of an impact finance society, member of the dance team. But after struggling to find work, she decided to pursue a master’s degree and upskill.

“AI has evolved so much, by the time I was ready to graduate, I felt like it was capable of doing what I spent two or three years learning,” said Leong, who is now considering remaining in college further to study for a PhD.

“I want to build my human capital so much that I am not replaceable,” she said. “I want to be the person on the other side of that AI that’s checking it instead of being the person that’s being replaced by the AI.”

Chad Meyerhoefer, economics professor at Lehigh University, said there had been “a tightening of the funnel” for younger people entering the workforce in the local area and nationally.

“The job market was very tight for new graduates last year,” he said. “Firms themselves, they don’t know how the roles will be restructured with AI.”

With many white-collar jobs expected to be the most exposed to AI replacement, a college degree may not be the ticket to employment it once was.

For software developers in the 22-25 age bracket, employment is down 19 per cent according to Stanford. Customer service is down by a similar margin. That contrasts starkly with jobs that cannot yet be replaced by AI: younger people working as health aides have seen employment rise 22 per cent. For stock clerks it is up 6 per cent.

Clare Walicki, who graduated recently from Lehigh to work in the insurance industry, said she had steered away from applying for analytical roles that risked being replaced by machines in favour of people-facing jobs.

Working in the student career centre, she said there was a sense of despondency hanging over job-seeking students who struggled to even get a response to their applications.

“A lot of students came in very defeated,” she said. “It’s easy to lose motivation when you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it.”

While hiring has slowed, the data does not yet suggest companies are actively sacking people as a result of AI.

Ryan Knepp, programme co-ordinator at the CareerLink job centre in Allentown, Pennsylvania, said many job seekers “have the impression that AI was a factor” in their job losses but few can say so “definitively”.

But he cited one recent jobseeker who came to the centre who said her whole department had been laid off after creating an app that could do their job more efficiently.

“That’s like the stuff out of movies,” said Knepp.

As US midterm elections loom, Trump has played down the negative side effects of the AI revolution, insisting “the jobs are going to be massive”.

In the Lehigh Valley — and in many communities around the country — young people feel powerless to slow its march.

“What’s a little man to do when everyone’s bickering and no one knows what’s going on?” asked Marsh, the software developer.

He said the tenor of the conversation reminded him of a scene from The Simpsons, where a dejected Bart complains he is having the worst day of his life. His father Homer corrects him: “The worst day of your life — so far.”

“The really stressful part is: I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” said Marsh.

Data visualisation by Ian Hodgson in Washington