Young People and AI Transformation

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The next step is for AI to accelerate the process of converting new science into new technology and commercializing it. Because the economic incentive is there, this will happen.

(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) will stand him in good stead when he graduates. But will it?

Other people who majored in obscure corners of the humanities have found themselves in high demand by the frontier model-building AI companies. The current situation can be best described as troubling. An August 2025 poll showed that 71 percent said they’re worried that artificial intelligence will “put too many people out of work permanently.” These fears are not unfounded. A recent study found that workers ages 22 to 25 have seen about a 13 percent decline in employment since late 2022.

Six months to a year ago, some educators started recommending training young people for blue-collar jobs. Unfortunately, it looks like robots with GenAI will be able to do that kind of work too, and now you don’t hear so much about that approach.

From the point of view of young people thinking about how to prepare themselves for a successful future life, this is like a game of 52-card pick up. The cards are all in the air, and it is hard to predict where they will land.

Accelerating Rate of Change

There are those who say that the AI revolution is more significant than the industrial revolution. Some maintain that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. Others say that the solution is a guaranteed income for all.

There are a few certainties in this environment. First GenAI is very early in its development. It is going to get better, and generate higher quality output, and demonstrate more capabilities as it rapidly evolves.

The rate of technology change is fast, but it is going to get faster. One of the leaders in the GenAI revolution, Andrej Karpathy, posted in December of 2025 that things are developing so fast that he himself can no longer keep up.

Even Alvin Toffler, the author of the 1970 book Future Shock, might be surprised by what GenAI is doing. And it is only going to get faster. Why? Because AI is going to accelerate it.

A professor at the University of Chicago says that, currently, AI is designing experiments. Conducting the experiments. Writing the papers on the results. Submitting the papers to a journal for publication. The journal sends the draft papers to distinguished reviewers who use AI to do the reviews. An AI takes the results of the reviews, updates the papers, and they are published. The next AI that is trained has these papers in its training data.

The next step is for AI to accelerate the process of converting new science into new technology and commercializing it. Because the economic incentive is there, this will happen. The result will be a rapid acceleration in the rate of technology change. Not just in AI, where AI is already designing the next generation of AI, but across all aspects of our lives.

All of this will strain our social, political, and economic systems and institutions. Will this create a demand for new people to address these problems? Or will AI handle them too? Again, it’s hard to predict.

An Approach for Young People Thinking About Their Future

So, what do young people, their parents, advisers, and potential employers do to prepare for the future?

1.) First and most importantly, try to keep anxiety as low as possible. Worrying about it won’t make it any better. In fact, getting anxious about it will make all of us less able to manage the transition we are going through.

2.) Closely related to lowering anxiety is understanding that you can’t predict with much certainty how the transition will unfold. Therefore, focus on following your interests. Learn about what interests you. Follow your passion. If you don’t think you have a passion right now or don’t know what interests you, then try a lot of different things. Experiment.

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