Technology

What explains the depressing job market — most starkly illustrated in a viral chart on X, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing the number of position openings cratering since ChatGPT was released? And what about early career jobs, which seem scarce these days, to the chagrin of recent graduates?

Some think that the softening in the job market should instead be attributed to the US Federal Reserve putting a kibosh to the era of zero interest-rate policy in 2022. Before it ended, companies borrowed massive amounts of capital at cheap rates and plowed them into high-risk startups — thereby inflating assets, making lots of millionaires, and fueling a gold rush of well-paying tech positions. (Squint at that chart in the previous paragraph and it does seem to support this thesis, with the decline in openings coinciding more cleanly with the interest rate hike than the release of ChatGPT.)

As for early career positions decreasing, some experts think the phenomenon predates ChatGPT and could be a sign that there are simply more college graduates than there are early career jobs where a higher degree is a must, along with other structural changes.

And there are the headlines, which are littered with stories of people getting laid off due to AI — but maybe that’s a function of some CEOs jumping the gun and buying into the hype even though AI still leaves much to be desired in practice. That’s reflected in the uneven adoption of AI across industrial sectors.

While generative AI looks likely to join the ranks of transformative, general purpose technologies,” the Yale study reads, “It is too soon to tell how disruptive the technology will be to jobs.