AI is Changing Jobs. Who Benefits?

Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs. The robots are coming for our work, right? But if you look at what's actually happening in companies right now, the story is more complicated and honestly more concerning in some ways.

What Companies Are Actually Doing

AI isn't really "replacing" workers the way people imagine. Instead, here's what companies are doing:

They're hiring fewer interns. They're cutting junior positions or just not creating new ones. And then they're turning to their experienced staff and saying "hey, you've got AI tools now, so you should be able to do the work of three people."

Someone with 10 years of experience using ChatGPT or other AI tools can absolutely crank out way more work than before. But if nobody is hiring juniors anymore, how does anyone get those 10 years of experience?

Who Gets the Gains

So AI is making companies more productive. But where are those gains going?

The winners:

• Company shareholders and owners. When you can produce more with fewer people, that extra money tends to stay at the top as profit.
• The AI companies themselves. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google... they're selling the tools to everyone else.
• Senior workers who figure out how to use AI really well. Though even they're getting pressured to do more without necessarily getting paid more.
• People building their whole careers around AI from the start. If you're AI-native, you might have an edge.

The losers:

• Anyone trying to break into a career. The entry-level jobs just aren't there anymore.
• Mid-career workers getting told "do more with AI" without the compensation to match their new productivity.
• People doing routine office work. These jobs are the most at risk.

The Problem with Entry-Level Jobs

This is the part that should worry us most. Career ladders need all their rungs. You can't climb from the ground straight to the middle. But that's kind of what we're expecting people to do now.

If law firms stop hiring junior associates, where do senior partners come from in 20 years? If companies stop training junior developers, who's writing the complex systems in 2040? If agencies stop bringing in junior designers, who's the creative director in 2035?

We're essentially eating our seed corn. The gains look great right now, but we're not investing in the next generation of skilled workers.

Possible Future Outcomes

Nobody knows for sure, but we can sketch out a few possibilities.

The grim scenario: We end up with a barbell economy. A small group of highly-paid people at the top who know how to work with AI, a large group of service workers at the bottom doing jobs AI can't do (healthcare, physical labor, personal services), and not much in between. The middle class just kind of disappears.

The optimistic scenario: At some point, we realize that massive productivity gains should benefit everyone, not just shareholders. Maybe that means higher wages. Maybe shorter work weeks. Maybe a stronger safety net. Maybe some entirely new way of organizing work and income. New types of jobs emerge that we can't even imagine right now.

What will probably happen: Something messy in between. Without real policy changes and deliberate choices about how to share AI's benefits, the market will concentrate gains with the people who own capital and the most skilled workers.

The historical pattern is that technology creates more jobs than it destroys, but that transition can take decades and be absolutely brutal for the people living through it. And there's no guarantee it works out well without society making active choices about it.

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