> There are really two observations here: 1. AI hasn't commoditized skilled labor.

The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics.

What is getting replaced (or rather, positions not refilled as the existing people move up the career ladder) is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors, because that level of workmanship can actually be done by AI in quite a few cases despite it also being skilled work. But this kind of replacement doesn't show up in any kind of statistics, maybe the number of open positions - but a change in that number can also credibly be attributed to economic uncertainty thanks to tariffs, the Russian invasion, people holding their money together and foregoing spending, yadda yadda.

Obviously this is going to completely wreck the entire media/creative economy in a few years: when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into seniors... and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.

This is my fear for everything. I lay no blame here, but at the same time, I can imagine an entire younger generation not actually learning... anything.

Part of learning is doing. You can read about fixing a car, but until you do it, you won't know how it's actually done. For most things, doing is what turns "reading a bunch of stuff" into "skill".

Yet how far will this go? I see a neuralink, or I see smartglasses, where people just ask "how do I do this" and follow along as some kind of monkey. Not even understanding anything, at all, about whatever they do.

Who will advance our capabilities? Or debug issues not yet seen? Certainly AI is nowhere near either of those. Taking existing data and correlating it and discovering new relationships in that data isn't an advancement of capability.

> The problem is, actually skilled labor - think of translators, designers, copywriters - still is obviously needed, but at an intermediate/senior level. These people won't be replaced for a few years to come, and thus won't show up in labor board statistics.

This is even more true for construction workers and cooks. The actually, actually skilled, I suppose.

Also, an AI still can't come close to replacing either interns or juniors—but, I suppose we're just supposed to act like shouldering more work cleaning up after an AI that can't learn rather than hiring someone up to the task is progress.

> when the entry side of the career funnel has dried up "thanks" to AI... suddenly there will not be any interns that evolve into juniors, no juniors that evolve into intermediates, no intermediates that evolve into senior

> This has happened before in other industries. Lots of things that are now automated or no longer exist due to computerisation (e.g. manually processing cheques, fixing many types of bookkeeping errors) were part of the training of juniors and how they gained their first real world experience. There is still a funnel in those careers. A narrower one, but still sufficient.

> and all that will be left for many an ad/media agency are a bunch of ghouls in suits that last touched Photoshop one and a half decades ago and sales teams.

AI killing the ad industry sounds great and I fully support it.

> What is getting replaced is the bottom of the barrel: interns and juniors

But in the context of highly skilled work, I don't think anyone hires juniors or interns to actually do any productive work. You typically hire juniors for the hope of retention of future intermediate talents.

It is not hard to find anecdotes of intermediate or senior translators, designers, or copy writers whose jobs were eliminated. Or their pay decreased. Do you have data?

Consumers aren't going to consume derivative slop forever though. You can do it for quite a while, but as with the MCU, people do get bored. At which that point the market would self-correct as a scrappy firm of passionate individuals would run circles around incumbent giants that lost all their talent.