The great AI unemployment wave keeps failing to arrive on schedule, and the commentariat has concluded the panic was overblown. Overall employment keeps growing. Veteran workers are doing fine. The apocalypse, we are told, was canceled. Look closer at the data, though, and something is being quietly amputated from the American economy. Not jobs in general. First jobs in particular.
A working paper from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, drawing on payroll records covering millions of workers, found that employment for Americans aged 22 to 25 in the occupations most exposed to AI has fallen sharply since generative AI arrived, even as older workers in the very same fields gained ground. Economist Erik Brynjolfsson’s analysis of ADP data shows the youngest cohort in exposed jobs shrinking year over year while their 35-to-40-year-old counterparts grow.
Harvard researchers studying 66 million workers across more than 280,000 firms found that entry-level hiring has collapsed at companies adopting generative AI, as reported by Forbes. The mechanism is not layoffs. It is doors that quietly stop opening. The young are not being fired. They are simply never hired, which produces no headlines and no severance announcements, only a generation standing outside.
Skeptics, including researchers at the St. Louis Fed, argue the broader hiring slump explains more of youth unemployment than AI does, and they have a point worth conceding. The economy is sluggish and that hurts new entrants most. But the Stanford data cuts through the objection cleanly.
If general economic weakness were the whole story, young workers in AI-exposed and non-exposed occupations would suffer alike. They do not. The damage concentrates precisely where the technology can do the work a 23-year-old used to do. That is a signature, not a coincidence.
The Bottom Rung Was Never Just About the Work
Here is what the efficiency argument misses entirely. Entry-level work was never valuable mainly for its output. The junior analyst’s spreadsheet, the first-year associate’s memo, the apprentice’s rough weld, all of it could have been done faster by someone senior. The point was never the product. The point was the person being formed by producing it.
Grunt work is how competence is built, how judgment is learned, how a young man discovers he can be relied upon. Automate the bottom rung and you have not streamlined the ladder. You have removed the part where climbers are made.
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. (Lamentations 3:27)
Scripture states plainly what every foreman, drill sergeant, and father once knew by instinct. The yoke borne young is what makes the man. Character is not a credential; it is a residue, left behind by years of showing up, submitting to authority, doing tedious things well, and being corrected.
A society that deletes the yoke because a machine pulls cheaper should not act surprised when it finds itself governing millions of unformed 28-year-olds with no ladder, no discipline, and no reason to believe effort is connected to reward. Idle, purposeless young men have been the raw material of every radical movement in history, and we are manufacturing them at scale.
There are signs some employers understand. IBM announced it will triple entry-level hiring, reasoning that AI handles the routine work while young hires learn higher tasks, a bet that the pipeline matters more than this quarter’s efficiency.
More companies need to make that bet, and fathers cannot wait for them. Trades, apprenticeships, small business, any path with a bottom rung still attached deserves a hard look. The question for your son is no longer just what career to choose. It is where he can still find a yoke to bear.
There will be no military draft in the US, I do not think . Europe is another thing. Germany is already preparing for conscription. The people who join the service now are doing it because they want to, and it is their choice. When there WAS a draft in the US; they took students, tradespeople, ......no matter. Israel college students are trained in marksmanship, and are always there to protect the country. Many other countries have a permanent arrangement, as well; but they do not call it a draft. They have raised the age here in the states to 42, if you want to join one of the armed services, my young friends say.
The most valuable thing in the future for a young man is going to be employment in a trade. A plumber, an electrician, a car mechanic , ..... not a white collar management position. I will always need someone to fix my heating and air. I will never need someone to not answer a phone when I call because he is in a meeting. It is back to the 1970s for a lot of us. We are sick of AI, "smart" ANYTHING, data centers and complications with just plain living.