The Kids Are Not Alright. AI Stole Their Future.

Remember the old story? The one about starting in the mailroom and ending up in the boardroom. It was probably a myth even in its heyday, but it held a kernel of truth: you started at the bottom. You did the grunt work. You learned the business not from a PowerPoint presentation, but by doing the tedious, annoying, essential tasks that make a company actually run.

That path is gone. And AI is the one holding the bloody saw.

Today, we’re being sold a slick new fantasy. In this one, generative AI is a tireless intern that works 24/7. It summarizes research, writes first drafts of emails, debugs simple code, creates social media calendars, and churns out marketing copy. Corporate leadership, ever thirsty for the sweet nectar of "productivity gains," is lapping it up. They see a way to trim headcount and boost quarterly earnings.

What they don’t see, or simply don’t care about, is that they’re not just trimming fat. They’re amputating the limbs of their own future. They are automating the entry-level job right out of existence.

The Great De-Skilling

For every junior paralegal who no longer has to spend hours on document review (thanks, AI!), there’s a junior paralegal who now never learns how to read a contract with a critical eye. For every junior programmer who uses GitHub Copilot to spit out a function, there’s a junior programmer who never develops the fundamental problem-solving skills that come from banging your head against a wall until you figure it out yourself.

We’ve been told this frees up young workers for "more strategic, creative" tasks. What a load of garbage. That’s like telling a culinary student to skip the knife skills class and jump straight to designing a Michelin-star menu. You can’t be a master chef if you’ve never chopped an onion. You can’t be a senior strategist if you’ve never done the research, organized the data, or written the boring emails yourself.

Strategy is a house built brick by brick from the dirt of experience. By taking away the dirt-level work, we’re not creating a generation of brilliant architects; we’re creating a generation of people who have only ever seen a finished house in a brochure.

This isn’t just about making a few jobs redundant. It’s about the de-skilling of an entire generation. These entry-level tasks weren’t just tasks. They were the classroom. They were the training ground. They were where you proved you could be trusted with something more.

No Room at the Bottom

The social contract, flimsy as it was, used to be that if you were willing to work hard and learn, there was a place for you. Now, that place is occupied by an API call. Companies are creating a permanent intern class—a pool of over-educated, under-experienced people stuck in a career purgatory because the bridge from "knowing about" a job to "doing" a job has been washed away.

What happens when an entire cohort of ambitious young people finds that all the entrance ramps to a meaningful career are blocked? They don’t just quietly go away. You get anger. You get resentment. You get a society that feels rigged, because it is.

We’re trading the long-term health of our workforce and the stability of our society for a few percentage points on an earnings report. It’s a catastrophically bad trade.

The champions of this new world will tell you I’m a Luddite, that I’m afraid of change. I’m not afraid of change. I’m afraid of stupidity. And sacrificing your talent pipeline to a glorified autocomplete function is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen.

So when you hear a CEO bragging about how they’re "leveraging AI" to "streamline workflows," hear it for what it is: a declaration that they’ve given up on training the next generation. They’re closing the mailroom for good. And we’ll all be poorer for it.