AI will disrupt the labor market, but the evidence suggests young workers may gain more from the technology than they lose.

Young Americans are entering the workforce amid dire warnings that artificial intelligence (AI) will end their careers sooner rather than later. But is it true?

It’s no surprise that nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds expect AI to have a negative effect on society. More than a third anticipate a negative impact on their own lives. Thankfully, the truth about AI is much more exciting than the doomers of my generation (Generation Z) would have you believe.

Technology Panics Have a Poor Track Record

Take a quick glance through history, and you’ll see that every new technology emerges to the sound of alarm bells. Television was turning children violent, radio was causing “unhealthy excitement” and, if you go back far enough, you’ll find reports warning that reading too many novels was bad for the mind. The worst predictions were eventually proven wrong.

AI is no different in this respect. In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton sounded the death knell for radiologists—at least those with flesh and blood. Within five years, Hinton said, deep-learning AI models would outperform humans, rendering any new radiologists surplus to requirements.

Fast-forward a decade, and AI has indeed transformed radiology, but the number of radiologists at Medicare-participating practices has risen by nearly a fifth. A new report from Build American AI outlines just how wrong predictions of a collapse in the radiologist job market, which many signed up to, turned out to be.

Hinton was so wrong because he reduced an entire profession to a single task and assumed demand would remain fixed. In reality, reading scans is just one part of a radiologist’s job. AI can free up human radiologists to spend more timeinterpreting findings, consulting doctors, and offering more bespoke care to patients. As the population ages, demand for medical imaging is set to grow, and so too will the role of the radiologist in American life.

Across the board, there’s scant evidence AI is causing a jobs drought. AI-led productivity improvements can create employment by lowering prices or improving quality enough to stimulate increased demand. And we’re already seeing some results. One recent study found that occupations with high exposure to AI grew faster in Brazil after the AI boom began. A 2026 PwC analysis of more than a billion job advertisements found that headcount at the most AI-exposed companies had risen by 52 percent since 2018, compared with 36 percent for the least exposed.

The signs are encouraging for young workers too. PwC’s analysis of 2.4 million entry-level jobs found that openings in AI-exposed roles requiring traditionally senior-level skills had grown by 35 percent since 2019, while other entry-level openings had fallen by 10 percent. AI is changing what employers expect from junior staff, giving those who can use it greater responsibility earlier in their careers. A generation entering the workforce alongside AI could become productive more quickly than any before it.

This technology will disrupt some roles. Some jobs will disappear. AI will also create new jobs we haven’t even thought of yet, as previous technological revolutions did. The thing that should really keep young people up at night is the possibility that a moral panic about jobs holds us back from a future of higher wages, new roles, and an abundance of improvements to everyday life enabled by AI.

An AI Regulatory Patchwork Could Become the Bigger Threat

Right now, a patchwork of regulatory models is emerging at the state level. A company that finds a new way to make medical imaging, scientific research, or private tutoring cheaper can fulfill demand that previously went unmet and, in doing so, create more employment. Soon, such innovations could be crushed under the weight of 50 different ways of regulating the technology. Even if the states broadly aligned, companies would still spend money that could otherwise be used to develop products and hire workers on repeated regulatory hurdles.

There will only be one beneficiary of this mess—and it won’t be young people. Advances in science and technology, and the accompanying jobs, could increasingly flow to China, whose best models have lagged the US frontier by an average of only seven months since 2023. To prevent America ceding its advantage in an industry it currently leads, Congress needs to step in and establish a national market with a single federal set of regulations. The objective should be clear rules that preserve competition and allow useful products to reach customers throughout the country.

Do this, and the young Americans worrying that AI will leave them on welfare may instead become the technology’s greatest beneficiaries. They will harness capabilities once the preserve of governments and the very largest corporations. They will do jobs that don’t even have names yet, delivering goods and services that are currently too expensive to provide to the masses. Congress should give them the freedom to build that future throughout America, for the benefit of the world.

About the Author: Jack Rowlett

Jack Rowlett is a contributor with Young Voices and a prolific writer on policy. He is a passionate advocate for liberalizing planning laws to tackle the housing crisis, harnessing the power of the free market to drive productivity, and ending the war on drugs. He regularly appears in the media on both sides of the Atlantic discussing economics, geopolitics, and the technological frontier. He writes the Build Vector Substack.

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