When the Rules Change: AI, Work, and Who Captures the Benefit
Unemployment is stable. Entry-level jobs are quietly disappearing. And beneath both of those facts sits a question our economic system has never had to answer before.
A Stanford research team recently published a study tracking 25 million US workers. What they found doesn’t match the headline numbers. Young workers in AI-exposed roles — coding, writing, legal, customer service — have seen employment drop by around 20% since late 2022. Workers in the same roles aged 35+ are growing.
This isn’t a forecast. It’s already happening.
At this special once-off Future Together meetup, we’re exploring what this means for work, for careers, and for the economic system built on the assumption that human labour is always a necessary input. Who gets the benefit when AI does the work? And what do we want to do about it?
No economics degree required. Just curiosity and a willingness to face what’s actually happening.
What we covered
- 📊 What the data shows: entry-level job hollowing and why unemployment figures don’t capture it
- ⚙️ Automation vs augmentation: why how AI is deployed matters more than whether it is
- 🧱 The two-tier economy: skills that complement AI — and their limits
- 🎰 The capitalism question: who captures the benefit when human labour becomes optional?
- 🌱 Two possible futures: what the optimistic path actually requires
Session slideshow