AI is hurting China’s already weak graduate job market.
An estimated 12.7 million graduates will join the workforce this year, the largest cohort yet. But “the supply of… graduate jobs has not kept pace” with ballooning college attendance rates, The New York Times reported. AI’s impact, already being felt in manufacturing and food delivery, is now hitting white-collar work: “Listings for traditional roles are dwindling” and some graduates have applied for hundreds of jobs without success.
Other countries have more unusual, if structurally similar, problems: AI is eating Kenya’s essay-farm industry, in which well-educated youths help Westerners cheat on university papers, The Times wrote: “Why pay a freelancer in Kenya when ChatGPT could do the job?”