First step on the career ladder looking shaky

The example of journalism may be a canary in the coalmine. Entry-level jobs in journalism often involve aggregating news items from other outlets in the style of your own employer, a task AI is well suited to if the facts are straight. I spent several years doing just that when I started out. In the same way that we see Amodei’s predictions taking shape in LinkedIn’s data, I see the entry-level diminishment beginning in my own industry. Business Insider, a digital outlet focused on financial and business news, laid off 20% of its staff late last week. CEO Barbara Peng said the newsroom would go “all-in on AI” and become “AI-first” in her note eliminating the jobs.

I speculate that the larger problem here isn’t job loss, its also purpose loss and value to the system loss. Those jobs weren’t just career stepping stones, they also were payroll taxes and citizen builders. Unless AI value creation is taxed in the same manner of Human creation UBI, Social Security and other social programs will be overwhelmed with displaced workers.

_{Quote Citation: Blake Montgomery, “Will AI wipe out the first rung of the career ladder?”, Tue 3 Jun 2025 09.21 EDT, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/jun/02/artificial-intelligence-jobs-techscape}