AI creating a jobs drought for young people, and it will only get worse, recruiter warns – The Irish Times

by WickerMan111

28 comments

  1. Ah well min wage jobs suck arse, they don’t teach you anything except your tolerance to misery, maybe they’re essential in that regard

  2. It’s gonna be carnage. Not only are you faced with AI but if you’re coming out of college you’re also facing competition from abroad, the gate is truly open now for “skilled workers” from abroad but in reality the work isn’t skilled in how we typically mean it. They’re jobs where education helps to perform the job but they’re not STEM roles. You could take a LC student and train them. But these people don’t tend to plan on staying in Ireland for long and they can make some money before heading back home. Zero job security but they fill a gap. This is the future of the job market. Thanks globalisation. And the thing is, you can’t complain because globalisation has been undoubtedly a net positive for the world but it doesn’t care who wins or loses on the aggregate.

  3. What a time to be finishing college.

    I did my placement with a semi state.

    Was verbally told that I’d have a job with them after college.

    Was then told that the “business needs changed” in October.

    Now I’m looking for grad roles in Cork, there’s like 3-6 total grad jobs and 4 of them tend to be in engineering.

    How does anyone make this work?

    And before someone says “try finishing college in 2007 during the recession”, don’t.

  4. Honestly if i was a young person thinking of going to collage right now your best option is probably to go into the trades and get a something that cant be replaced by ai because the laptop generation is going to get hit hard by ai.

  5. And what usually follows when masses of the young to middle aged find themselves with no work and no hope of employment? I do worry AI is gonna be a catalyst for major social upheaval, potentially including revolution. Hyperbolic maybe?

  7. There was a AI expert guy on sky news today whose been involved in AI since the early years who warns that we’re heading towards disaster.

    His prediction is that millions will be on the scratcher in 5 years if the current trajectory of developments in AI continues.

  8. I swear watch as AI just shotgun backfires on them, AI is good sure but it will never replace my ability to coherently and repeatably write code that works, all it does is

    >get asked a question
    scan internet for thing
    spit out answer

    While I can think about a problem, figure out what works and implement it

  9. We started a long time ago with this issue for young people when entry level jobs required 5 years experience.

  12. There’s so much alarmism surrounding AI it’s fast becoming a boogeyman.

    I remember a few years ago, before ChatGPT or any other LLM, I was browsing job listings. There were lots of job listings, but all of them wanted 5+ years experience. I remember at the time a recruiter friend saying that this was the norm. That companies didn’t want to spend the time and money to train people up, and they largely didn’t have to in order to fill positions. Another issue, and probably the biggest right now which links back to what I just said, is outsourcing graduate positions to reduce labour costs.

    The reality is these problems have existed since before the advent of LLM. Graduates have been dealing with these issues for years. Now we have a boogeyman in AI that people point to as the cause of all these problems when these problems have existed for years.

  13. NHS trusts all over the UK are giving people in admin redundancies right now (in the process) and the explicit reason, in part, is that they hope to replace people with the aid of AI.

    It’s literally happening. Low skilled jobs are disappearing.

  14. Utter nonsense. Just another technology that changes things but people adjust to new roles. We used to have rooms of people doing what a single Excel sheet does today. We adjust and people do more valuable work.

  15. No doubt AI is an issue and is/will continue to threaten entry level jobs but at the same time, from my own experience of hiring for junior roles in IT this year and the year previous, some of the youth of today make themselves incredibly unattractive to hire. I’ve had multiple instances of CV’s with no experience or a year at most in a loosely related role looking for a salary of 60k+. I don’t know what they’re being told they deserve but thats madness

  16. Heard a chap on with Bobby Kerr this morning talking utter muck about how ai allowed his agency to script edit and create a series of marketing campaign videos with next to no staff input. He was delighted with himself and completely clueless to the likelihood that it’s slop.

  17. Ireland keep supporting the techies as they destroy humanity and the planet….but we need the taxes.

  18. Remember Irish graduates, the government’s importing university students from all over the world to compete with you in the jobs market when you graduate! and cause your lefty students who celebrate diversity you can’t even recognise the problem!

  19. Up to a point where the amount of people unemployed are no longer able to afford products and services, at which point your AI is going to cost you the business….

  20. Another step in the march of enshitification. AI will do it fast, cheaply, and badly. Result: we get crappier newspapers magazines.

  21. Can I just ask honestly, what job has AI comprehensively or nearly replaced so far in Ireland? And I am not talking about companies using AI as an excuse, so many of us are hearing and suffering from it. But I would love to know where someone honestly says “I used to input this and do that and the AI did it better than I did”. I don’t think I’ve seen any stories of that. 

  22. Humans need not apply. Cgp grey got it right but was a bit early. What do we do when million of people are unemployable through no fault of their own.

    Take a look at the video ‘humans need not apply’

    This is what’s happening plus offshoring, there’s little hope of jobs coming back.

  23. Yeah, doing a masters in economics and cannot get a job right now. All the companies have just scaled back on their grad roles. I thought this masters would allow me to find some decent paying roles

  24. Its far more to do with tariffs and interest rates, AI is merely the cover.

  25. No doubt AI will axe some jobs and I’m not attuned to what’s happening in other fields but I’m implementing and supervising the supposed market leader AI chatbot at my work. It’s grand for the lazy who can’t be arsed typing keywords into the search bar or read help articles (certainly am guilty of that too) but anything even remotely complex, one of the team has to jump in. It makes finding information faster but does not solve any issues. I don’t know what the future holds but at least customer-facing work isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

    Bigger problem is that companies ask for 3+ years experience for entry level roles that could be taught to anyone with a brain in no time.

  26. I hope I am not the only one who thinks that the AI boom we’re going through will eventually fade away. Yes companies will go hard into it now but consumers and customers will dictate how much of it actually stays.

    I can’t be fucked with AI chat bots and all that bollocks so hopefully that and the elderly will keep customer service jobs around. Self-service check may have saved some wages but even they aren’t as popular as expected.

  27. AI combineed with massive ongoing investments in robotics from giants like Tesla, Figure, Boston Dynamics, and Chinese firms, is rapidly pushing automation from factories into everyday life. Advanced vision systems, reinforcement learning, and low-cost hardware are creating robots that can generalize tasks—folding laundry, cooking, elderly care, or warehouse picking—without custom programming.

    By the early 2030s, humanoid robots are projected to reach price parity with cars 20–40k, while specialized robots (delivery drones, agricultural bots, surgical arms) will drop even faster. Falling sensor and actuator costs, plus cloud-trained AI models, mean a single robot can now learn new skills in hours instead of years.

    This will make physical labor economically obsolete in most structured and many unstructured environments. Service jobs (retail, hospitality, construction, logistics) will automate fastest after manufacturing already did. The result: abundance of goods and services, plunging costs for elder care and education, but also rapid displacement of tens of millions of medium- and low-skill jobs within a single decade.

  28. Ask a long time cancer researcher if breakthroughs mean the cure is imminent.

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