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🌊 “A Clanker Stole My Job”

How AI is helping turn the Gen Z job market upside down

Gen Z male and AI bot

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By Max Frost

“Clanker.” 

It’s not every day that a new slur comes into existence. Yet so widespread is AI adoption that the internet has coined the word for a non-human being that pisses you off. And with each day, it becomes more likely that people blame clankers for taking their jobs. 

In May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned executives and government officials not to “sugarcoat” the situation. Within five years, he said, up to half of entry-level jobs would be eliminated. He predicted that the US unemployment rate would be between 10% and 20%. 

Is this already happening?

On paper, the American economy is doing relatively well. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq are both at record highs; the unemployment rate is at a relatively low 4.1%; and inflation, at 2.7%, is near the 2% target and at its lowest rate since 2020. 

But young people are struggling to find work.

Between 2018 and now, 22- to 34-year-olds of all education levels – high school diploma, some college, associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, and graduate degree – have seen their unemployment rates increase. The trend is starkest for one group: College grads. Less-educated Americans have typically had higher rates of unemployment than more educated Americans. This is changing. 

The jobless rate for someone with only a high school diploma between ages 22 and 27 is 7.3%, barely higher than the 7.2% in 2018. For someone with an associate’s degree, it’s 4.1%, slightly up from 3.9% in 2018. 

By contrast, the unemployment rate among 22- to 27-year-old college graduates has increased 29% since 2018, from 3.8% to 4.9%. Unemployment among graduate degree holders in that age group has jumped 31%, from 3.2% to 4.2%. After 22- to 27-year-old degree holders, unemployment has jumped most among 28- to 34-year-old degree holders. 

So in today’s job market, a 22- to 27-year-old is better off having an associate’s degree than a bachelor’s or law degree. Why?

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In January, Duolingo, the language learning company, laid off 10% of its contract workers. Three months later, CEO Luis von Ahn announced that the company would be eliminating many more contractors – and not just a chunk, but as many as possible.  

Companies often conduct layoffs when they’re struggling. But Duolingo wasn’t suffering: In fact, it reported its highest quarterly earnings in company history and nearly twice the expected amount in the first three months of 2025.

The layoffs were because Duolingo was succeeding, specifically at implementing AI. 

"AI is already changing how work gets done,” Ahn said. “It's not a question of if or when. It's happening now." He said Duolingo would "gradually stop using contractors to do work AI can handle." 

A month later, a senior JPMorgan Chase executive announced that she expected headcount to fall by 10% within the coming years. A month after that, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote to employees that AI provided a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” he said. 

And a week after that, Ford’s CEO declared, “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US.”

CEOs keep repeating that AI is not coming for employees’ jobs; it’ll only help them become more productive.

In announcing his recent layoffs, Duolingo’s CEO wrote, "This isn't about replacing Duos with AI
It's about removing bottlenecks so we can do more with the outstanding Duos we already have."

He added, "Change can be scary, but I'm confident this will be a great step for Duolingo."

Yet Duolingo users and, potentially, employees expressed anger about the cuts, prompting Ahn to walk his statement back. 

"To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality," he said in May, a month after announcing the layoffs. 

Similarly, Amazon CEO Jassy said, “We will need
more people doing other types of jobs.”

Yet the numbers tell a different story.

The sectors experiencing the most layoffs of people with at least a bachelor’s degree are information, finance, and professional and business services, per the Burning Glass Institute, which researches the job market. The institute also recently found that people who graduated in 2023 had a one-point lower labor force participation rate a year out of college. Typically, graduates are 2 to 4 points more likely to be in the labor force a year out of college. 

In April, the CEO of freelance marketplace Fiverr wrote, “It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person – AI is coming for you.”

And at Shopify, an online marketplace platform, managers are now prohibited from making hires until they prove that AI isn’t able to perform the job. 

All of this bodes poorly for young, educated Americans. But is it all doom and gloom? 

AI has already created a new industry that is employing tens of thousands of people. It will undoubtedly help businesses save time. Startups we’ve spoken to, some cash-strapped, have used it to automate rote tasks, freeing up staff and increasing their odds of success. Small businesses, which often struggle to find staff, have done the same.

Zander Frost – my brother and the COO of the Chronicle, the leading weekly newspaper in northern New York State – said this: “AI enables small businesses to make their processes much more efficient, which can allow a small number of people to accomplish a much wider variety of tasks. Small businesses always struggle for staff, especially in areas without a growing young workforce, and this can be the difference between life and death. AI making one job easier can lead to an entire business’ worth of jobs being saved.”

Meanwhile, Bobby Pinckney – the founder of AI-driven social media company Verse – was mixed: “I’m very optimistic about the long term potential here and very concerned about how this is going to play out in the short term, especially for our generation.” 

And Mir Hwang, founder of events booking platform GigFinesse, was optimistic: “The narrative that AI is ‘stealing’ Gen Z jobs misses the bigger picture. Every disruption in history has eliminated some roles while birthing others, and this generation has the unique opportunity to design what comes next
.Gen Z’s advantage is that they understand both worlds.”

Whether the disruption is good or bad remains undetermined, yet some degree of it is bound to happen. That begs the question: What is the government doing about it?

That’s the subject of tomorrow’s subscriber-only deep dive. If you’re interested, you can subscribe here

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading. We’re very curious to hear your thoughts on this one, especially anyone who’s seen the impacts firsthand. Send in your takes here.

A couple of interesting responses to yesterday’s story on the vaccine court:

Alexandre wrote: 

I'm Brazilian, and it's strange to read about these questions about vaccines. The only thing that works in Brazil is the national vaccination system. Vaccines are tested and approved by a government agency. There are not many reported cases of harm to the health of children or adults. Furthermore, it would be necessary to have information about the child's health before the vaccine, their diet, whether they took any medication, and other variables that could harm the child's health. I also find it strange that there are questions about the safety of vaccines, but not about medications. Every medication has a contraindication and can cause harm, and yet many are sold freely in pharmacies next to the candy aisle.

And Luke wrote:

I am an emergency Physician just shy of 20 years. I’ve seen vaccines help the human race on numerous occasions, most notably, MMR and haemophilus influenzae (HIB vaccine.) my generation of ER doctors came just after this and almost no longer sees neonatal meningitis or very sick children from measles, mumps or rubella.

However


What I’ve seen even more so since graduating residency is the overwhelming influence of big industry pharmaceuticals. The deeper you dive the more you realize how our medical education has been tainted. There’s no reason young Healthy Fit individuals with elevated LDL need a statin. You look at neon needs that are freshly born. Get an immediate hepatitis B vaccine. This is a sexually transmitted disease. There’s no need to give a five minute old infant their shot. We also smear erythromycin ointment on a newborn baby’s eyes and the name of preventing chlamydia. There is no need for this. Almost every mother is tested for chlamydia, and almost every mother is negative. Even when they tested negative, the babies still get this pharmaceutical intervention. This is just financially motivated.

The medical industry as a business has grown way beyond good patient care. I found the need to revert and regress to lifestyle interventions and often shun expensive treatment treatments. I recommend this for my patients. My brother is a young healthy person who Has a long history of smoking. He recently had some benign palpitations, and mostly negative testing after that. His cardiologist still wants to do an angiogram, a very invasive procedure. The only reason for this is the reimbursement.

Think of the huge customer Bass, the vaccine industry has. Well, a lot of these vaccines are important, giving hundreds of shots to babies in their first year or two of life seems excessive and likely harmful. We should spread them out of our life and really decide whether vaccinating someone is important or not.

During the pandemic, I was as scared as everyone else. I took the first two or three Covid vaccines because I thought it was the right thing to do. As time goes on, we’re learning more and more of the devious behavior of industry, the likely bad affects these vaccines have had, and their shielding and protection from any harm. 

I fully support revamping the vaccine court. I think it should be used as a way to compensate people when they were injured. I’d also like to see the entire medical malpractice industry follow the same suit to have a compensation fund and avoid individual lawsuits which are devastational to a doctors practice.

In case you missed them, find our latest reports below:

And don’t forget to tune back in tomorrow for our deep-dive on the government’s approach to AI.

See you then,
Max and Max