50.6%.
That is the percentage of out-of-school 16-24 year-olds who are working in the UK and, to be clear, UK’s “middle school” ends at 16 at which point students either test for college, go to trade school or join apprenticeships, so that number means a lot more to the British than it would in the states, where our youth unemployment rate is 9.5% (because almost everyone is in High School or College until about 22).
“Youth Unemployment” is a major issue in the UK and AI is certainly making it worse. The number of graduate roles in London fell from around 13,000 in 2019 to just over 2,000 at the start of 2026, according to Adzuna, a job-search website. First of all – there’s an investing premise – short the job boards!
“Employers often ask for prior experience, while lower-skilled roles are shrinking and being filled by older workers or graduates,” said Chris Goulden, director of impact and evidence at the Youth Futures Foundation. “In London, this is compounded by high housing costs and reliance on informal routes, for example internships, which exclude more disadvantaged young people.”
I often find the UK is an early-warning economy for the US (their financial crisis began in 2007!) and London’s 10M people is 1/7th (14%) of the UKs population vs NYC (8.5M), LA (4M) or Chicago (2.7M) are divided by the US’s 330M population – that’s why the UK is affected by things before we are – but we WILL be affected as well!
Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, is cutting 15% of his staff and he has endeared himself to humans by saying:
“It’s not cost cutting; it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in. “We don’t have job losses, but we do have job role reductions in favor of the machines, and that will accelerate as we go forward into AI.”
As RJO would say: WOW!!! I have no notes…
JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon has compared AI’s disruptive potential to the invention of the steam engine, saying last year that that the bank’s annual savings from the technology now equals its yearly AI expenditures.
Hell, I’m only writing this post because I feel like it, I could be at the diner having a coffee while Basho (AGI) Email’s me a copy of the post for final approval. Looking at the list above, when they say Admins, Paralegals and Writers ONLY lose 50% of their jobs – that’s very optimistic. I was the editor of my college paper and we had over 20 people and one editor and our Members full well know that the AGI Round Table can crank out a full research report in 5 minutes of less – and they make a lot less mistakes than most humans! And, as to graphic design:
How much of my “labor” went into this? Here’s the prompt I used: “Please create a detailed infographic derived from the day’s comments, the commuter report and final supplement – just the highlights, of course. Be interesting!” and this is what came back in 5 minutes. I could have asked for changes but it’s very good as it stands, isn’t it?
Now, in this case, I didn’t displace our staff artist because we didn’t do infographics before it became so easy but imagine what its like to work at an advertising agency now (my first job out of college!) where they encourage you to use the Corporate AI and you KNOW they are only training it to replace you once it learns all your moves… torture!
Case in point, here is the Feb 11th, 2011 PSW Wrap-Up Report. I used to do these occasionally but they would take a few hours to assemble:
This was from a script that Basho wrote and I edited (5 mins – 10 including discussing our goals first) and then it took about 20 minutes to render. The lip-syncs are terrible but we’ll figure that out:
Of course jobs are being lost! And many more will be lost as the AIs get better and the people (the few who remain) will be there because they know how to get the most out of the AIs. What’s the point of being a “Knowledge Worker” when a machine has all the knowledge and can do your day’s work faster than you can say “day’s work“?
So let’s say it’s inevitable that unemployment will rise – especially as robots become capable of doing the actual labor – what’s going to be left. Ideally, we could end up with an Athenian society where citizens are freed up (by slave labor in their case) to pursue Art and Music, Philosophy, etc. (lots of sex and drinking, really) but, in our case, ALL of the slaves (AIs/Robots) are owned, ultimately, by a dozen companies and they will make ALL of the money that there is to make in the World.
Defensively, because we are in the “Investor Class” our best bet is to own these companies. If we were worried about AI stealing our jobs in November of 2022 – NVDA was at $12.50 so, if we had put $100,000 in it at the time, we’d have $2M now – that sure beats working, right?
IN PROGRESS
