While recent graduates kicked off their summer of potential unemployment by booing commencement speakers extolling the benefits of AI, they may have to look elsewhere to blame for those low hire rates. One top economist argued the generation has reasons beyond just the technology to blame for the weak job market they are inheriting, and the proof is simply because today’s unemployment data changed little after the introduction of today’s popular AI tools.
“Many have been quick to blame the gap on ChatGPT’s November 2022 release and the broader rise of AI,” Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok said in a recent blog post. “But the AI-exposed sectors where these graduates cluster are also the most sensitive to Fed tightening, trade-war uncertainty, and slowing immigration, so the entry-level squeeze is far more likely a product of the general low-hire, low-fire labor market than of a technology that companies had barely begun to deploy when the gap emerged.”
