AI is upending the job market for young people. These three things will help them prepare
Photo by Serena Tyrrell on Unsplash
Last month Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, told Axios that developments in artificial intelligence could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the US within five years. If that happened, unemployment could spike as high as 20%. Amodei’s point was that the public needs to be aware, and governments must respond. Otherwise we’ll miss a critical window to shape things in favor of humanity over bots.
Anthropic has just released its latest chatbot, Claude 4, and overall the industry is going full throttle, with billions of dollars invested to accelerate and profit from what will be profound changes to how we live, learn, work and relate to one another as humans. We can choose to respond and shape it, or throw our hands up like we did with social media and see what happens.
“You can’t just step in front of the train and stop it,” Amodei said. “The only move that’s going to work is steering the train—steer it 10 degrees in a different direction from where it was going. That can be done. That’s possible, but we have to do it now.”
Amodei is not alone in seeing how jobs will be disrupted: Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, recently pointed out what folks in the workplace are seeing firsthand: artificial intelligence is increasingly threatening the types of jobs that historically have served as stepping stones for young workers.
None of this is meant to scare you. My goal is helping young people through this moment in the best way possible, which means helping you all—parents, caregivers, educators, coaches, generally excellent humans—identify simple ways to do that.
In this post I’m suggesting three things—there are obviously way more—that we can do to help our young people now, with an AI-driven future in mind: Help them learn to manage their use of tech, intentionally cultivate connection, and lean into the ability to struggle in learning (because learning is hard).
Relentlessly cultivate connection
As I wrote last week, AI companions are dangerously appealing to young people. So nice! So not awkward! And yet we need human connection to support and sustain us, as a buffer against the winds of change, and as fuel for life. No bot will comfort you when grief comes, as it inevitably will, and joy is better shared with humans (last I checked, AI can’t hug you). I am excited for AI to help with emotional distress, practice tough emotional conversations and myriad other things. But humans need human relationships which means investing time and energy, and discomfort, in developing them. Here are four ideas for how to do that:
No phones at dinner: practice conversation.
No phones in school: practice focus and build attention.
Encourage phone-free activities: games, a hike without a phone, tech free Sunday mornings. A family challenge to see who can go longest on a weekend without looking at a screen: awareness of how reliant we are; reflection on the comfort that comes from not having a phone to check
Start and maintain a conversation with teens about how they use AI. This can include asking about AI companions—do they use them, why they might, and why human relationships are important? It can also include talking about AI use and cheating, which is probably the number one way it’s showing up in our lives today. Ask kids and teens about their use of ChatGPT: Are they using it to learn better?—having it quiz them, stretch them, or explore—or are they using it to do the learning for them?
Cultivate creativity by doing less with tech
For the past 20 years, we have been living in a world geared toward improving performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). One goal has been to get more girls into those fields and to better understand the systemic barriers that previously kept them out. Job growth was strong in STEM: jobs were well paid.
But the world is changing again. It’s time to acknowledge that creativity is also a skill worth investing in (it always was, of course, but now AI means there’s an employment link). The OECD has started measuring it with a test of creative thinking. Employers say they want that skill(chart from the World Economic Forum):
As I wrote in an earlier post, one of the key ways to help kids unlock creativity is to let them be bored. Not bored rigid by compulsory activities, but with enough downtime and space to think for themselves:
“The act of tuning out of external stimuli activates a part of the brain that is critical for creativity: the imagining network, or default mode network (DMN.) This is the reflective, meaning-making area of the brain. It can pull us away from our current context or perspective, and it pushes our consciousness into imagined realities, pasts, and futures, and into the perspectives of others. The DMN lights up when our minds wander or when we daydream, and it helps us contemplate the bigger picture of a situation, connect the dots of the world at large, and generate novel solutions to problems. Kids need to engage the DMN to think creatively.”
That means resisting the urge to overschedule our kids, or let them overschedule themselves, with endless studying, sports, extracurriculars—or, of course, screens. As I noted in that blog, social media and phones in general are designed to capture our attention, taking up all the time we might otherwise spend being (creatively) bored or just being creative. Encourage downtime, and phone-free time. Explain how letting AI do things means not developing the muscles to do them themselves.
Get comfortable with the discomfort of learning
I’ve said it before: learning is hard, and rather than making it easy, let’s get more comfortable—more familiar, with more ways to cope—with being uncomfortable.
Of course, this is easier said than done in adolescence, when young people are hyper aware of social status (wanting to avoid social vulnerability at all costs) and also hell-bent on novelty (their brains are primed to test things and seek the thrill of newness).
Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, just published a preprint of a book chapter which argues that the rise of cognitive offloading to AI—essentially, getting it to do the hard work for us—is linked to recent IQ decline in developed countries.
Oakley and her colleagues suggest that the use of digital tools is one factor, and the other is a shift in education away from the memorization and direct instruction practices that can underpin foundational knowledge—eg, we’re not doing enough rote learning.
In The Disengaged Teen (and in my writing about being a parent of a kid going through a rote-learning-led exam system) I’ve argued that education needs to focus much more on “learning to learn,” and less on the insistence that kids suck up facts like a sponge. I’ll dig into Oakley’s research in a forthcoming post, but where I see it missing out is the motivation piece: as kids get older they demand more of a reason to show up and exert effort.
As we argue in our book, we need to balance knowledge acquisition with knowledge application, because to get kids to do stuff it helps tremendously if they care and want to. This isn’t coddling: it’s smart educational design. This is even more the case in a world where AI can do much of the work: rather than demotivating kids because they don’t ‘need’ to learn facts or reason out problems, we need to explain how the technology’s capabilities can motivate us to make absolutely sure we don’t fall behind.
Anyone who professes to know where AI will be in 10 years is probably selling some AI. Whatever disruption takes place, we can be sure that we will still need humans, we will need to be able to manage our own tech use*, and we will have to be okay doing the hard bits of learning.
*Let’s also hope governments decide to regulate tech.