3 days ago
Robots are taking grad jobs. Do we give up or use our brains?
W hat do you get when you cross an overeducated population with an absence of high-quality jobs? This is, perhaps, the setup to history's least funny joke. But the punchline is important, perhaps world-changingly so. We are about to find out what it is.
This year the number of graduate jobs advertised by employers has gone down 33 per cent. AI is to blame, naturally. Robots are doing the grunt work that previously fell to capitalism's least pitied whipping boys: recent history graduates who dream of accountancy qualifications and an annual holiday in Santorini. As a result we can expect to see a bunch of smart, overeducated youngsters wandering about with nothing to do.
In a way, this is an acceleration of something that was already happening. According to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics I can find, in 2017, 31 per cent of graduates were in jobs for which they were overeducated. We will now look back on them as the lucky ones. AI is about to make the problem so much worse.
