News of the Day 6/11/25: AI
There’s no question that artificial intelligence has come a long way in the last few years. And it’s true that many jobs are likely to be re
Paywall free.
More seriously, from the NY Times:
"For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here" (Paywall Free)
You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had “deteriorated noticeably.” Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains. [...] Using A.I. to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn’t good enough. You could use A.I. to automate some routine back-office tasks — and many companies did — but when it came to the more complex and technical parts of many jobs, A.I. couldn’t hold a candle to humans. That is starting to change, especially in fields, such as software engineering, where there are clear markers of success and failure. (Such as: Does the code work or not?) In these fields, A.I. systems can be trained using a trial-and-error process known as reinforcement learning to perform complex sequences of actions on their own. Eventually, they can become competent at carrying out tasks that would take human workers hours or days to complete.
I've been hearing my whole life how automation was coming for all our jobs. First it was giant robots replacing big burly men on factory assembly lines. Now it seems to be increasingly sophisticated bits of code coming after paper-movers like me. I'm not sure we're there yet, quite, but the NYT piece does make a compelling argument that we're getting close.
The real question is, why is this a bad thing? And the obvious answer is people need to support themselves, and every job cut is one less person who can do that. But what I really mean is, if we can get the outputs we need to live well with one less person having to put in a day's work to get there, what does it say about us that we haven't worked out a way to make that a good thing?
Put another way, how come we haven't worked out a better way to share resources and get everyone what they need to thrive when we honestly don't need as much labor-hours for them to "earn" it as we once did?
I don't have the solution, but if some enterprising progressive politician wants to get on that, they could do worse. I keep hearing how Democrats need bold new ideas directed to helping the working class.
More on the Coming AI-Job-Pocalypse
I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking. (X)
Paul Krugman: “What Deindustrialization Can Teach Us About The Effects of AI on Workers” (X)
How AI agents are transforming work—and why human talent still matters (X)
AI agents will do programmers' grunt work (X)
At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work (X)
Why Esther Perel is going all in on saving the American workforce in the age of AI
Junior analysts, beware: Your coveted and cushy entry-level Wall Street jobs may soon be eliminated by AI (X)
The biggest barrier to AI adoption in the business world isn’t tech – it’s user confidence (X)
Experts predicted that artificial intelligence would steal radiology jobs. But at the Mayo Clinic, the technology has been more friend than foe. (X)
AI Will Devastate the Future of Work. But Only If We Let It (X)
AI in the workplace is nearly 3 times more likely to take a woman’s job as a man’s, UN report finds (X)
Klarna CEO predicts AI-driven job displacement will cause a recession (X)
& on AI Generally
19th-century Catholic teachings, 21st-century tech: How concerns about AI guided Pope Leo’s choice of name (X)
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? (X)
Two Paths for A.I. (X)
The Danger of Outsourcing Our Brains: Counting on AI to learn for us makes humans boring, awkward, and gullible. (X)
AI Is a Weapon Pointed at America. Our Best Defense Is Education. (X)
The Trump administration has asked artificial intelligence publishers to rebalance what it considers to be 'ideological bias' around actions like protecting minorities and banning hateful content. (X)
What is Google even for anymore? (X)
AI can spontaneously develop human-like communication, study finds
AI Didn’t Invent Desire, But It’s Rewiring Human Sex And Intimacy (X)
Mark Zuckerberg Wants AI to Solve America’s Loneliness Crisis. It Won’t. (X)
The growing environmental impact of AI data centers’ energy demands
Tesla Is Launching Robotaxis in Austin. Safety Advocates Are Concerned (X)
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act would ban states from regulating AI (X)
& on the Job-Pocalypse & Other Labor-Related Shenanigans Generally, Too
What Unions Face With Trump EOs (X)
AI may be exposing jobseekers to discrimination. Here’s how we could better protect them (X)
Jamie Dimon says he’s not against remote workers—but they ‘will not tell JPMorgan what to do’ (X)
Direct-selling schemes are considered fringe businesses, but their values have bled into the national economy. (X)
Are you "functionally unemployed"? Here's what the unemployment rate doesn't show. (X)
Being monitored at work? A new report calls for tougher workplace surveillance controls (X)
Josh Hawley and the Republican Effort to Love Labor (X)
Karl Marx’s American Boom (X)
Hiring slows in U.S. amid uncertainty over Trump’s trade wars
Vanishing immigration is the ‘real story’ for the economy and a bigger supply shock than tariffs, analyst says (X)
