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Original poster

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

307 replies

Tffjyvkbh · 23/04/2026 09:56

On back of the worming class boys thread. If AI takes over white collar jobs, what happens to all the m.c. communities. Education and aspiration became a feature post industrialisation once blue collar jobs disappeared and you needed education to get ahead in office jobs. What happens now? My kid is only 6 but already thinking about this.

If AI takes jobs, does education become pointless. How are parents guiding their kids? Looking at parts that lost industries, will parts of South east become like that once office jobs go?

If even Oxbridge and STEM is no longer enough to guarantee a comfortable life, then what for the young people?

OP posts:
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FuckRealityBringMeABook · 27/04/2026 08:02

How did Anthropic act responsibly when its entire business model is rooted in mass violation of IP law?

How is making AI available to the public at large compatible with net zero? I have no problem with strictly regulated AI in, for example, medical research settings. I have huge problems with letting it loose unrestrained. And so should everyone else, given its problems with baked-in misogyny and racism.

Is AI sexist? How artificial images are perpetuating gender bias in reality

AI is increasingly a feature of everyday life. But with its models based on often outdated data and the field still dominated by male researchers, as its influence on society grows it is also perpetuating…

https://www.rfi.fr/en/science-and-technology/20250316-is-ai-sexist-how-artificial-images-are-perpetuating-gender-bias-in-reality

socks1107 · 27/04/2026 08:05

My post grad daughter got a job in her area of degree, she did so so well and I appreciate is lucky. She does however use a lot of AI in her role. My second daughter will graduate next year and has a job in mind that AI can’t take so she should be ok. It’s been a worry though

Holdinguphalfthesky · 27/04/2026 08:10

StealthMama · 26/04/2026 09:15

Generic degrees will become pointless, because our speed and ability to learn using AI will write off the need to study business for 3 yrs for example. As a tool, information is at our fingertips, research time is reduced by 70%.

We still need lawyers - who will use AI. Authors - who will use AI. Doctors - who will use AI. Teachers - who will use AI.

Carers will still use AI. Apps in their phones. As will Builders, bus drivers, restaurant workers.

there will still be a need for junior level staff.

New degrees are already becoming available in using AI but they are mostly technical or data based. My niece is going to study Architecture next year and we found a course that includes use of AI in design.

if you are not learning, in whatever your line of work is, how AI will create opportunity then you end up in the group that it will replace. Low level commodity task based work will be replaced. That’s fact.

For the younger ones it was known for the last 3 yrs that 80% of their future jobs didn’t exist yet because of the AI capability that was coming, the speed at which AI is creating jobs owns quite dramatic - yes it’s still in the technical field - those who will enable AI usage everywhere else. But we will always need people to manage the AI agents and tools in every industry they are used.

Its not doom and gloom by any means, but it is the Industrial Revolution of our time. For as long as the press scaremonger about it the longer people will resist getting involved out of fear. I do wish they would change the narrative.

The government are already looking at charging a levy to organisations who make redundancies specifically due to AI in order to fund retraining and skills uplift for those in lower skilled work.

The gaps around sustainable skills transformation are gradually being closed.

Show quote history

i mustn’t have made my point about university clearly. Not all businesses will need a degree, not all degrees will lead to better jobs as they might have in the past. If someone wants to do a (non vocational) degree, they should do it for its own intrinsic value, and the chance to study in depth, rather than pinning expectations to the outcome of having a degree. And do it if they can afford to- far fewer people are going to see the debt as worth having if degrees don’t lead routinely to higher incomes.

As a teacher, I have to say that AI is not all that in lesson generation. It’s like AI writing- quite obvious and not terribly useful.

flygenza · 27/04/2026 08:26

FuckRealityBringMeABook · 27/04/2026 06:30

Not to mention the environmental destruction of its vast energy consumption

Streaming has (currently) a higher carbon footprint than AI. I have never seen a post on Mumsnet bemoaning Netflix, Iplayer or Apple TV and the impact of streaming on the planet.

BridgetJonesDaiquiri · 27/04/2026 08:44

StealthMama · 27/04/2026 07:50

It isn’t the AI companies that need to do all the auditing, regulating and decision making of this though, that’s my point. They are building and providing technological advancements and capabilities that organisations and individuals have to decide how to use, for what purpose, and what skills and roles they require to do it. That is where workforce strategies come in to play both privately and publicly. The type of work is changing. Some tasks will no longer be required, new tasks will be generated.

Regulation of use is advancing especially in already regulated markets.

Mythos is a a good example of self regulation. It was built to write code which means it can detect faults in that code as well though in this case at a level far supreme than by existing tools. In the wrong hands this would be dangerous - especially if you add quantum computing and the disruption this will cause in cyber security management.

Anthropic acted responsibly. Why is this perceived as a bad thing?

Lots of differing industries have developed products in the past that could be dangerous and were prevented from release and access restricted.

The more we learn about AI the more we learn that the threat is never the technology, the threat is the people allowed to use it and their objectives. Our governments need to deal with this at scale. But for every day people, AI can be an extremely beneficial tool at work, at home, in education, in healthcare and so on.

Show quote history

I would love to feel as optimistic as you. I think we’re all agreed on the bad actor point and the need to regulate but this needs to be done at speed and the speed is not as yet there. The US is not going to put the brakes on while wants to “win”. There wasn’t a whole lot of international regulation in the nuclear arms race until we realised, oh wait, this is a major threat to humanity.

Anthropic acted very sensibly re Mythos. I’m talking about the technology being the risk (both inherently in how it is designed and how it improves, the scaling of autonomous agents’ use and the use of AI tech generally in the wrong hands). Other companies and individuals will not necessarily act as sensibly as Anthropic. And there is no national or international regulation yet. The godfathers of AI (Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio) have been ringing the alarm for a while now about the real possibility that we lose control.

Geoffrey Hinton the other day at the Digital World Conference “We're at the point in history when it's urgent to try and solve this problem," he said, yet "very few resources are being put into it". He suggested "maybe one percent" of work on AI was going into making it safer. Nuts.

Back to the OP though. My children are young (under 10). I’m not even thinking of the type of work they will be doing as young adults because I have no idea what the future will look like in 10 years. If I had older teens, and they wanted to go to university, I’d advise them to do something that they’ll enjoy studying for three years and go for the life experience (I appreciate that going to uni as simply a life experience is not something everyone can afford to do or would want to do).

BridgetJonesDaiquiri · 27/04/2026 08:46

socks1107 · 27/04/2026 08:05

My post grad daughter got a job in her area of degree, she did so so well and I appreciate is lucky. She does however use a lot of AI in her role. My second daughter will graduate next year and has a job in mind that AI can’t take so she should be ok. It’s been a worry though

What job is she thinking of that AI can’t take?

FuckRealityBringMeABook · 27/04/2026 10:30

flygenza · 27/04/2026 08:26

Streaming has (currently) a higher carbon footprint than AI. I have never seen a post on Mumsnet bemoaning Netflix, Iplayer or Apple TV and the impact of streaming on the planet.

Show quote history

There is some discussion around this, not much on MN I grant you. Some people are going back to DVDs etc on the back of it. THe question is one of

a) transparency > the big AI firms are making it very hard to measure their footprint (see Sasha Luccioni), hence the announcement this week that the UK govt has underestimated the AI energy carbon footprint by a factor of 100

b) it is growing very fast and adding to, not replacing, extant unsustainable consumption in streaming etc.

I am happy with limited and regulated use of AI to track ways of reducing energy consumption, water leakages etc. Less so with it being used to put creatives out of jobs by pirating their (my) IP.

edit to add link https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-increases-ai-emissions-forecast/

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