Scott H. Young has a thoughtful piece on what’s still worth learning in a world with AI. He cuts through both the panic and the hype to look at what the data actually shows. The biggest finding is probably not all that surprising: early-career workers in AI-exposed fields are getting hit hardest.
Another report from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab notes that early-career workers in AI-exposed fields (such as programming) have seen a relative decline in employment, even as employment among workers aged 30 years and older increased. This matches my intuition that AI coding agents can do a lot of junior developer tasks pretty well, but struggle to match the experience needed to tackle more serious work.
Young’s advice is to cultivate generalist skills. Not the content-free “critical thinking” kind, but genuinely transferable knowledge:
In an environment of change, it’s better to be the hardy dandelion rather than the hothouse orchid. Similarly, I expect with AI-induced change, people who have maintained diverse interests and skills will be best positioned to take advantage of the change, whereas extreme specialists will face a greater risk of extinction.