From the Wall Street Journal, August 26:
Young workers face rising AI competition in fields like software development, but some also benefit from AI as a helper, new research shows
Artificial intelligence is profoundly limiting some young Americans’ employment prospects, new research shows.
Young workers are getting hit in fields where generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT can most easily automate tasks done by humans, such as software development, according to a paper released Tuesday by three Stanford University economists. They crunched anonymized data on millions of employees at tens of thousands of firms, including detailed information on workers’ ages and jobs, making this one of clearest indicators yet of AI’s disruptive impact.
“There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” said Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who conducted the research with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen.
At the same time, the economists found evidence that in fields where AI can help people in their work, rather than replace them, employment among young people is improving.
The work—which hasn’t been peer reviewed or published yet—helps answer a question that has been burning since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022. Subsequent versions, and similar generative-AI tools from competitors such as Google-parent Alphabet, have only heightened worries the technology will make some jobs obsolete.
While anecdotal evidence has emerged showing AI’s effects on certain professions, such as software coding, there has been little harder evidence that the technology was significantly weighing on the labor market. One problem: ChatGPT rolled out during a period when the Federal Reserve was curbing economic growth by sharply raising interest rates, and job growth was moderating from the pandemic-related hiring surge. The new research helps tease out the AI impact from those other factors.
Using records from paycheck processor ADP, the economists were able to get a granular view of how generative AI has affected the labor market. The data includes detailed information on workers’ ages and occupations, making it far more comprehensive than the survey of households the Labor Department uses for its monthly employment report. The Stanford economists first looked at areas where AI can automate many of the tasks workers perform, and therefore potentially replace them. Those include jobs such as software developers, receptionists, translators and customer service representatives.
Their finding: Overall employment in those categories has softened since late 2022 relative to other occupations, with the weakness concentrated among younger workers.
“After late 2022 and early 2023 you start seeing that their employment has really gone in a different direction than other workers,” Brynjolfsson said.
Among software developers aged 22 to 25, for example, the head count was nearly 20% lower this July versus its late 2022 peak. These are daunting obstacles for the large number of students earning bachelor’s degrees in computer science in recent years.
For workers aged 26 to 30 head count was close to flat, but among older workers head count continued to grow.
Other factors could be hitting those computer-science jobs, including a general slump in employment at technology companies or pandemic-related education disruptions. But the data suggest such possibilities can’t explain away the AI effect on other types of jobs. Head counts among customer service representatives—a category that, unlike software development, generally doesn’t require a college education—followed a similar pattern....
....MUCH MORE
On top of that, the average Gen Z employee seems very different from those of the generations that preceded them, a difference that can be summed up with the comment: "You're a pain in the ass."
Of course the exceptions are gems, they take initiative, will work until a job/task is completed, can communicate at an adult level, have age-appropriate emotional control etc. When you find these young people grab them and hold them close.
