Cross-posted from Substack.

AI job displacement will affect young people first, disrupting the usual succession of power and locking the next generation out of our institutions. I’m coining the term youth lockout to describe this phenomenon.

Youth Lockout

We are on track to build AI agents that can independently perform valuable intellectual labour. These agents will directly compete with human workers for roles in the labour market, often offering services at lower cost and greater speeds.

In historical cases of automation, such as the industrial revolution, automation reduced the number of human jobs in some industries but created enough new opportunities that overall demand for labour went up. AI automation will be very different from these examples because AI is a much more general-purpose technology. With time, AI will likely perform all economic tasks at human or superhuman levels, meaning any new firm or industry will be able to [...]

---

Outline:

(00:24) Youth Lockout

(03:34) Impacts

(06:54) Conclusion

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.