In the Cohen brothers’ movie, the title of which I have taken to introduce this month newsletter (from Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men”), the central theme is about the older generation being unable to cope with a new, more violent and amoral world. We can safely say that, for different reasons, younger generations may feel the same when looking at their future.
The results of government policies in most of the western world, while concentrating wealth, are cutting the social tools that older generations leveraged to get an education and move vertically up the socio-economic ladder.
As a consequence less and less people can access higher education. Young people today have one of two options available: either forego higher education entirely and get a job that does not require any degree, or accept to start a higher-paid job with the handicap of a debt burden, burden that is getting heavier and heavier with the years.
For those who decide to face today’s higher education challenge, there is an additional obstacle to overcome. Entry level jobs in the corporate world are being engulfed by AI. Over the past, young new hires were given simple, repetitive tasks to begin in an organization. This would give time to the organization to understand the person they’re working with, their professional personality so to speak, while the new hire would have the time to assimilate the organization’s culture and establish a relationship with his/her coworkers and managers.
Today, these are the jobs that AI is proving being very good at: they are simple, do not compromise the core business in case of a mistake, and are repetitive and monotonous. As a consequence, new graduates are taking longer and longer to land their first job and develop the experience required for them to move into more relevant roles within the organization.
This system is clearly not geared toward young generations. If anything it seems geared toward making them fail, struggle, or resign. No wonder we are facing unprecedented levels of stress, anxiety, and depression among the youngest. If this is what the job market has to offer, I think that being depressed is the most natural answer to the situation, not a problem to fix. The problem to fix actually is the current job market.
There is nothing wrong with a company selecting the most efficient and cost effective solution for a certain task. The problem arises when the door through which young new hires used to enter the job market, represented by these simple repetitive tasks, is shut down without an alternative.
Companies have to ensure that if they decide to use AI for what until recently was done by an intern or a new hire, they create a new path for fresh blood to enter the organization. The risk of a narrow-sighted approach that looks only at performance and costs is for the organization to become obsolete very quickly.
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