Aibu for being increasingly worried about the job market?

[gymboe]

another threat of redundancy here. Business not going well and to be honest we are full steam ahead with AI.

a quick search in my large town in south of England:

• 5 x nhs jobs (4 of which I am not qualified for and one is really terrible pay as just three days per week)
• school jobs: just three and very low pay
• our high street is mostly made of charity shops and vape stores. Retail doesn’t offer what I want.
• a big employer now hardly owns any office space. There are just a few jobs. I’m not qualified.

I do have a degree but found myself in a specialised account/client mgmt type role. Pays around £50k.

10 years ago there were loads of these type of jobs, decent salary even if you had to start low, good career progression, hundreds of them and tonnes of temp agencies. And the nhs had loads of admin jobs. Not to mention school jobs being plentiful.

where the hell have they all gone?

this is a huge issue. Massive. I’m really worried.

Even things like electricians/ plumbers etc. wont be immune. If there arent people working then who is going to pay the plumbers and electricians? If everyone became plumbers and electricians ( which seems to be the answer given to Everything) yet people aren't moving, redecorating , getting new kitchens fitted etc then there wont be the work available for them. I think AI will eventually have to be controlled- partly because it relies on human input. Its parasitic so if you kill off the the jobs creating the content eventually the same recycled content will go round and round. I also think that the one thing that will stop this progressing is market forces. If people have no money or jobs who will buy the things that make rich people rich? Its the China model. They make a lot of money selling crap to us. We had less money so they lent us money so we could buy more crap from them. ( I dont really understand economics so there may be a complicated reason Im wrong!) Or there will be a massive crash where people borrow money that will never be paid back.

Electricians and plumbers aren’t immune because technology is taking their job too.

AI isn’t the only technology.

the building sector is awash with self assemble materials.

you can’t a shop job because they were taken a decade ago by self service check out and automated supply chain

people are naive to think physical jobs have any future security. It’s such a tired trope to tell people to be tradies

Also- isn’t the obvious answer for people to train for a job in AI? It’s not developing or implementing itself!

It’s dreadful. My industry has basically collapsed. People I know are hugely respected woth incredible track records just sitting unemployed for months after month. I see nothing coming up they could reasonably apply for.

if you can, retrain. If you can only get a job after months of searching it’s only going to be worse next time. And your employer has you where they want you.

big picture though it’s atrocious that no one is standing up for workers in the face of this shite.

A bit off topic, sorry, but don’t worry too much about the ND aspect, IT is full of autistic people and most interviewer will be more focussed on his technical skills than his soft skills.

It will be interesting to see the next quarterly vacancies data from ONS. At the moment they are saying the number of vacancies was down 12% over the last year but stable over the quarter to September

I have a hunch that AI will be a short to medium term disruptor. We lost loads of jobs with automation (and going further back the Industrial Revolution) but we learnt other skills and did other things.

whats not realistic is hoardes of unemployed people, not paying tax, and not being able to afford to support a capitalist system. there is no point in AI driven commerce is there is no market to deliver it to.

Here are the stats from Office for National Statistics, which show that unemployment IS creeping up to the level it was at during 2020 covid times (latest is 5%), but very much lower still than the 2008 to 2012 period (7-8%):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms

ONS also says: “The number of unemployed people per vacancy was 2.5 in July to September 2025. This is up from 2.3 in the previous quarter (April to June 2025), and up from 1.8 in the same period a year ago. Recent increases are because of the continued decline of vacancies and an increase in unemployment in recent periods. The last time the number of unemployed people per vacancy was 2.5 or more outside of the pandemic period was in May to July to 2015.”
So although this does not sound like a huge increase, there will be local and industry variations.

I work in this area. I get lots of complaints about AI not delivering meaning results and this comes right back to poor incoming data quality which is not being validated.

I work in a very niche largely non technical specialism in a high demand technical area, that people who dont work in it tend to go 'blimey, you must be worried about AI' about (its a much lower level concern in reality, for various reasons i wont bore you with here)
However i have been baffled by the lack of self awareness in my area, people going 'why dont we explore using AI for this' for things where the only logical conclusion is someone losing their bloody job! Unless the C suite are demanding it, what on earth are people doing speaking up with ideas like this, honestly. We have plenty of problems where AI would help where it wouldnt put people's jobs at risk, too!
The problem is I work with a lot of technical people who have an over inflated sense of self importance and they struggle to accept that some of the work they do might be 'interesting' or 'absolutely 1000% necessary' but isnt actually what the company employing them want to pay them for, and that in fact the company would actually like them to get on and do their day job... so it simply doesn't occur to them to ask 'but SHOULD we do it, just because we can'...

Business rates up. Small businesses laying off staff or closing. Add in Ai and an impending recession and unemployment will rise.

I feel this so hard 😭 I have spent a year having people ask me whether we can “just apply some machine learning to this”

😭😭😭

honestly- in my profession it’s a not a bad idea for AI to do the transactional stuff. We really need more intelligence applied to the lower level strategy- cost control, data insight, efficiencies etc- where there is a real gap.

Agreed @Bambamhoohoo. There is a place for AI but it is not the answer to everything.

I see the argument that previous technologies have been assumed to utterly destroy jobs haven't gone that way, and I hope that's the case. But I worry about the context now - we're in this massively unsustainable late capitalist landscape which literally doesn't give a toss what happens to actual human beings as long as shareholders get their return. It doesn't care if the earth is burning because of our overconsumption, which will destroy their shareholder value along with everything else . It doesn't care if the economy will collapse because huge numbers more people will be reduced to poverty in the longterm if it can slash the biggest business overhead - salaries. Its suicidal for them too, but we've seen what they're like regarding climate change, so why would they be any different regarding automation when it'll give them great shareholder value for a little while?

I was reading about an icecream shop closing due to business rates m, NI and the rest, that’s not AI. We really don’t need the compounding of job losses.

Agree the first wave of internet revolution ushered in fantastic new ways for social media to get at consumers and bombard them with infomercials, one-click buying, ‘discounts’ and deliver to door or drop off, as well as ways to keep people consuming more and more tv, media etc.

what will the second wave - AI bring? Universal basic income so we can sit at home on benefits and passively consume whatever content we can afford?

we do know that the energy costs of it are huge…

Its madness isnt it!!
I've decided to just start saying it now... however that does involve saying it to my boss, who is so lacking in self awareness and people management skills he would simply be incapable of going 'ooh, yeah good point, shall we focus on using it for X instead so we look willing to the seniors' and would instead try and argue with me about how much time it would save...

One difference with AI compared to the first gen internet revolution is the big players from the first revolution already have made sure they own the second….

I was made redundant this year as they went from 10 local call centres to 2 giant ones which are basically battery hen type places
got another job. Let go after 8 weeks as “over staffed”

That's the next step. Anthropic have already started on this.

School jobs will go next,teachers,teaching assistants etc will be replaced by AI- already happening in some EU countries and theres a bews clip that Russia will be starting it too,especially as they have a lot of remote areas and children have to commute long distances

Sadly jobs in AI are very exposed to AI. Software engineering is one of the first affected careers and that’s really the core skill for anyone working to develop this technology. Seeing the same crash in entry level roles there. “New grad” ML engineer now often requires highly relevant PhD (which was hard to foresee since PhD takes 4-6 years!) plus publications plus 2-3 years industry experience training large models (very hard to get this experience outside of the big labs due to the cost). It’s ridiculous. To get all that experience you’d have to be about 30 and have had everything go right in order to get a so called entry level job. And those positions are getting hundreds of applicants each. At the same time there’s a crazy rush on those with 10+ years relevant industry experience driving those salaries into the millions.

The AI labs don’t want to hire juniors because they’re betting on AGI before the investment in newer hires would pay off.

At least that’s one explanation. I suspect it’s more complicated than that. For highly skilled jobs where it takes time for a new grad to become productive and in a culture / economy where it’s normal to move jobs every couple of years it’s hard to justify being the company that does the training. They’re finding it doesn’t pay off to hire new grads compared to poaching from other companies. But everyone is making that decision at once.

I suspect there’s a lot of off shoring happening but companies prefer to blame AI because it sounds more exciting.

In the UK especially I think there’s a huge brexit effect and long term political chaos hasn’t helped us. In the US there’s the orange man. And US tariff uncertainty is hitting worldwide.

I am concerned about how AI will affect knowledge based rather than manufacturing based economies. The uk is very exposed in that way. We made money not by actually manufacturing a lot of stuff but by excellence in eg bio tech, financial services, higher education maybe. Giving up manufacturing was a terrible long term choice.

In the end I actually think the biggest problem is a massive ongoing failure of governments in allowing private wealthy individuals to own more and more of everything. Result is money locked up and the real economy grinds to a halt.

Unfortunately, over the next five years A.I will decimate the job market.

Either the present government has no idea about this, or it's by design and they are watching the results as they come in.

All call center, and most customer contact roles will gone by 2030. Any routine, repetitive tasks will be given to A.I or a machine.

In today's market the over 50s can't find work, young people can't find work. What happens in the near future?

I am convinced we will return to the upstairs/downstairs/little matchstick girl times - a small group of very wealthy people who own the resources and means of production and a real ‘working class’ providing services for them and their lavish lifestyles (think domestic staff) and doing horrific grunt/labour intensive jobs. The middle class as we know it will disappear and we will go back to a huge divide between the haves and have nots and the vast majority will be the have nots.