What happens to kids if AI takes entry level jobs? What you advising them?

The other day I noticed some blatantly AI-generated greetings cards in the shops. I feel really sorry for graphic designers who spent years developing their careers. Companies aren't going to pay them to spend hours doing something that AI can do for free within minutes.

There's not a chance in hell that graphic design will be the only career affected, it's just the most visible one. AI is going to steal a lot of jobs. Does anyone remember Cleverbot from around 2013? Look how simplistic that was compared to ChatGPT and Claude. Imagine what chatbots will be able to do in 2036. It's actually somewhat scary.

Exactly. This is why we are encouraging our children to take a different path to us. Unfortunately the school system is designed to educate the pupils towards this end and is too slow to respond to a changing world. Home Education and instilling a lifelong love of learning is a great way of mitigating this. Future generations are going to need to be autodidacts and be flexible in order to thrive, IMO.

Since anything which has been digitised can potentially be hacked perhaps people will increasingly value privacy and not want their personal info to be digitised in any way.

Education is never pointless. Just saying.

Good point, we are at the moment at a point where some are in thrall and some are not.

How do we control the narrative though?

I am part of that in the tax advisory world, but I have to meet my client demands. And we are losing clients to AI. If they’re paying AI enabled firms or even publicly available AI, then I don’t have the income to be able to hire people, I have to consider redundancies in the team.

So I need to keep up with the AI development and create efficiencies with AI to meet client demand.

I can’t influence client demand or other firms setting up with more AI and fewer staff.

We could as a society, but we are a capitalist society, if there’s an opportunity to make money or save money by using AI and not humans, I doubt that everyone is going to make the decision for the greater good and opt not to develop or use it that way.

We are all trying to learn from big hacks. The British Library one may not have had a lot of impact on finance and business but it's taught us a lot about vulnerabilities that inform

No it’s much worse than that!

and who do you prosecute?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/12/lab-test-mounting-concern-over-rogue-ai-agents-artificial-intelligence

And that’s what they said then too This really isn’t any different.

Sadly I think the answer is - if AI takes the current entry level jobs, new recruits will be only hired higher up the business. This will be a) fewer white collar jobs and b) instead of on the job training, you’ll be expected to have completed more training to jump straight in higher up.

If B comes to pass, it’s not going to be good enough to just get a degree. You may find more vocational masters level courses. This will entrench further privilege- only the kids of parents who can cover 6 years of post 18 training will get the opportunities.

You’d be hard pressed to find an organisation that isn’t storing their confidential data digitally. The risk of hacking already exists, implementing AI doesn’t materially increase that risk.

Ok so say the worse happens the true apocalyptic scenario, no jobs, everyone living on one house, people just running down the family money, no one having relationships or children because no one can afford it

schools closing
people doing their own dentistry
stray dogs breeding everywhere
dirty streets
empty shops

say this happens?

isn’t it best to not worry about it before it does? Keep a bit of optimism?

right now companies using AI are doing so on very reduced rates, the people who have invested in AI have invested hundreds of millions of dollars and will at some point want a return on their investment

H was explaining this with simple figures to make it easier to understand
so right now AI costs £50 a day to run
the true cost is £1000 a day
at some point the AI providers will have to make this flip but when?

there was a man who wanted a marketing person for his small growing business
he was persuaded to spend on AI instead to do it for him
so he thought I will give it a go - on reduced rates
it took him hours going over everything AI did, it wasn’t quite right,
then he saw an job listing for the AI company for a human marketing manager
and he thought “hang on if it’s so good why is the company selling it to me not using it”
so he sacked it off and hired a human as his original plan

it’s an industry built on sand right now

it will be fine

there will be jobs

Somehow I trust that Americans will ensure it works for them, but will they change things to accommodate the Brits?

I think they are having a quiet brain drain and the H-1B visa system that imported talent into silicon valley is not working under Trump as well.

So not so sure it will be US will be an issue but other countries will.

Best analysis I saw of what AI currently doing is not taking jobs - jobs are a series of tasks and it's taking those and some jobs it's leaving last 20% of job as can't do and in some case never will be able to do - so it what happens to that % left p/t work or pushed into an entire job reducing number needed or not pushed higher up chain of employment.

I don't think anyone can say how it will fall out in job market - but as PP says apprenticeships and getting into trade isn't as easy as MN often makes out. My DC are at uni and about to graduate - two of their DGP saw entire areas dominate industry they went into not last out their working lives - and they trained in own time to try and keep up but car manufacturing and garment industry pretty it left these shores - you get as good as you can to get remining jobs and when that no longer an option adapt to what jobs there are.

I don't think aiming to control the narrative and make wise human choices is naive. Things will change but it's not out of our hands.

I work with many people who are AI experts and doing stuff at the cutting edge of this technology. Even they are very divided on what the future looks like. Some are optimistic, some pessimistic. Right now, paradigms are shifting so quickly that the ground is like quicksand and it's hard to make confident predictions or position yourself "safely" with regard to anything, when it comes to how AI will affect it. Nobody really knows what the picture will look like in 10 years when your six year old will start thinking about careers. You honestly just have to try not to worry about it and see how things pan out.

In regards to the entry level jobs worry specifically right now, I'd say one thing teens could be encouraged to do is to do any extra curricular / voluntary / self started / freelance projects that involve taking on leadership roles and showing/acting on initiative. These are the kind of qualities that are still sought after in white collar roles.

My organisation has embedded a paid for secure AI and it has access to all closed documents but won’t scrape the information back into the web, that’s part of the package
Sounds good... Until it gets hacked @JulietteHasAGun

I spend time every day thinking about this, and working in developing the AI. I think it’s extremely naive to think that it will just be a tool that sits alongside my existing job. It’s already changing my job, and has radially changed it in the last 3 years. It’s not going to stagnate there - that rate of change will just accelerate over the next 30 years.

We are already replacing jobs in accounting and tax with AI. We are creating new jobs too, but I don’t think it’s fair to say tax and accountancy are AI proof without backing that up with reasoning.

Your settlement details might not be online but I’d assume they’re on the company sharepoint platform. My organisation has embedded a paid for secure AI and it has access to all closed documents but won’t scrape the information back into the web, that’s part of the package. So if I go on and ask it a question, it knows who I am, it knows my role and has access to spreadsheets, policies, etc. The AI will often suggest things like “do you want me to run this idea past document X to ensure everything is fully mapped”. I don’t even need to tell it to do that.

I do agree with a pp that we are currently struggling to envisage what changes will happen because of AI. I think the best advice is to take all the training opportunities around AI you can get. Try and keep up/be one step ahead of others around you. Get seen as the “AI expert” in your organisation.

The best advice is to control the narrative. Jobs may change or disappear but we control the rollout - we as in humans

There will be jobs in It still
Or we will all be able to do 3 day werks.
Or hands on jobs
Critical thinking jobs
Relax
Enjoy life

Perhaps more people will join religious groups in the future ?
A communal way of life ?
Monks
Nuns

Once HMRC become tech enabled, you might not be in a room with the tax authorities. And it absolutely does know what companies are under audit and what settlements you’ve made. The AI knows that about my clients already, it has visibility of the correspondence from HMRC so it knows all about any ongoing and historic enquiries.

I agree the AI isn’t even close to replacing advisers yet for the reasons you explain. I disagree that 30 years from now (and maybe 5/10/20 years from now) that all you’ve just articulated won’t be done by AI.

The main reason I’m not worried about my career is that I deal with busy people who don’t trust the AI gives the full answer and instead prefer human interaction and the trust and reliance that human interaction brings.

But speak to teenagers - if they have an issue with a product they’ve bought, would they resolve it with a chat bot or would they prefer to go into a shop and deal with a human to get a resolution? We are raising a generation who is growing up alongside AI, which I think will area significant shift in that attitude. They won’t care about the human element as it hasn’t been part of their life in the way it was for every adult alive today. If they’ve always had the convenience of tech and working with AI is essentially their mother tongue as they’ve done it their whole life, then why would they want the inconvenience of having to meet a person, wait until they’re available, build a relationship and accept the element of human error when the AI is capable of cutting across all of that?

I think you're assuming that all AI is like the public face of ChatGPT or Grok. Firms already have their own systems which have access to all their data. Accountancy and tax advisory are massively affected by AI and cutting their grad schemes as a result.

The thing with AI is i see it as a bit like facebook.

When facebook started, everybody was sharing everything. Accept any body as a friend, post loads of your private information online, post about anything. Loads of content facebook could monetise, it was interesting so it drew more and more people in. We thought facebook was the product but the user was, we gave over so much for free and we were sold for marketing.

Until... people stopped. No one shares anything, no one posts on walls or feeds, your holiday snaps stay offline.

And facebook has become something else. A platform for shite videos so that you scroll endlessly and more advertising can be put in front of you. Does any of that advertising really drive sales? Debatable. But it makes money for Meta.

AI will morph & become something else because at some point they need to monetise it and right now, it has not happened. It has "learned" loads from everything that was online for free but what happens when people stop letting it access/use their content.

And I hark back to my earlier post that we are not lamenting the loss of the man who used to light the gas street lamps.

The problem for the current generation is that the AI tool is so powerful it will change how we work and what we do - it’s unlikely to be a tool that just supports existing jobs.

If you’d have asked the person shovelling horse manure behind the horse and cart what tools he needed to improve his job and efficiently, he would have talked about better shovels and protective equipment. He wouldn’t have foreseen the revolution of the motor car that removed horse manure from the streets entirely.

And that’s the problem with asking today’s world about how AI will change the landscape, as we tend towards thinking about how it can make our existing lives easier - not how it can revolutionise the way the world operates. I have no doubt there will still be jobs (the motor car needed a driver and a mechanic and a petrol station after all), but most people aren’t visionaries who understand how AI is evolving and so it’s really difficult to guess where the jobs will be, as they are likely jobs that don’t even exist yet.

It is good advice to find what you’re good at and what you enjoy, specialise in that and then when it’s your turn to enter the job market work out how you leverage that as best possible in the landscape at that time.