Welcome, my son, welcome to the machine.

Pink Floyd, Welcome to the machine, 1975

In the previous two essays, we lingered on a grim precipice, focusing on those pushed out of professions by AI, on mid-career collapse, on professional redundancy in real time. But that was reflecting my own fears. In my personal future, there are many roads to take, many trains to ride, as Otis Rush once told us. But one of those possibilities could be an AI-propelled express train to the scrap heap. The last two articles were expressing that dread, of erasure by automation.

But there is another kind of erasure we have not yet considered: the professional lives that never even start.

What happens when there is no beginning? This is the story not of the obsolete, but of the precluded.

We talk about automation replacing jobs, about AI quietly eating away at once secure roles, take accountants as an example. But at the base of the tower were always the entry-level roles, the foot in the door, the internships and the graduate programmes. Openings on the starter rung of the ladder are the jobs that are vanishing fastest of all. No fanfare, just gradually being erased. The 22-year-old idealistic graduate is prevented from becoming the 52-year-old global expert.

AI systems now routinely carry out first-draft writing, basic visual design, call centre scripts, transcription, data entry, preliminary coding and low-level legal summaries. They can even successfully do some forms of medical triage. These were once the province of the young entrant. Not anymore.

Young people now are trying to enter a workforce that has closed its gates. Corporations decide that something, rather than someone, can do the entry-level jobs faster, cheaper and without needing a mentor, a lunch break or a salary.

In this context, youth is not an asset, but a liability. Why hire someone you need to train, when the machine arrives fully formed?

The erosion of entry-level work is not some speculative horizon. It is already happening. This is a slow, disquieting theft of potential. In addition, it is not evenly distributed.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 60% of the population is under 25. The Middle East holds similarly staggering youth demographics. Youth unemployment and underemployment in both regions is endemic and has been so for several generations. In Nigeria, the median age is 18. In Egypt, it is 24. What will these millions of young people do in a world were even basic roles are consumed by automation?

What dreams will we sell them?

Already, many are pushed toward migration, not driven by a sense of youthful adventure, but necessity. This kind of migration, the kind that fills newsfeeds and provides a rich seam for the chattering classes, commentariat, is hardly driven by hope, with young men from places as far afield as Mauritania or Afghanistan wanting a shot at the American or European dream. It is not a case that the grass is greener in North America or Europe, but because the soil at home will not sustain a future for them. That is why they walk, hitch rides, pay smugglers, cross deserts and drown in seas, or the Darién Gap.

The motivators for human movement are layers of conflict, corruption, climate change and collapse of the state. All too often these causes are intimately linked. And now, like gasoline on a bonfire, we add a cold, unyielding intelligence, headquartered in Silicon Valley and fuelled by optimism, that does their jobs before they can ever do it themselves.

It is like a pre-emptive firing of a whole, global generation.

And it is coming for everyone, because the model is everywhere: across Western cities and Eastern megatropolises, in schools and suburbs. A young person may graduate from a good university, done an unpaid internship, and see graduate openings few and far between. They could be one of 6000 applicants for the role of “Junior Analyst” and then have their CV rejected by a machine. Nobody even read it; neither the CV nor the cover letter.

The system is now very picky. They were rejected because the machine did not like their formatting or a small deficiency in their CV.

The entry-level job becomes an oxymoron. It now requires 3 to 5 years’ experience. A LinkedIn following. A certificate in something to do with AI, like prompt engineering. And a personal brand. It is not entry at all. It is more like an endurance test. Squid Games.

So, what happens when the majority of young people feel locked out of the future? By this, we do not mean a delayed future, but no future at all: excluded before they even had a chance. What happens to the basic functioning of society? Is this not a symptom of a failed state?

What do the young people do? They do not revolt. Not yet. Instead, they immerse themselves further into what the machine can offer: they scroll, they meme. They cultivate irony as self-defense. They learn to perform optimism, while inside, a quiet violence is brewing. They live at home, far longer than they want to. They work gig jobs, hold multiple side hustles and hope that something, somehow, turns into stability. It never comes. What comes instead is a deep-seated, ambient anxiety that never leaves. A growing sense of uselessness, lack of purpose, that the world was not built for them. This has been a long, punishing assault on our younger generations since 2008. Kicked in the teeth by the financial crash and the recession, punched in the gut by political outcomes that affect them directly, drop-kicked by the Covid-19 pandemic. And now enduring the low blows of automation.

You can see it in their eyes, in what they say and what they do not say. They feel it. They know it has all been a lie.

We told them that AI is just a tool. But they know that a tool does not erase jobs. A tool doesn’t write, copy or file taxes or produce movies and music and images in seconds. A tool doesn’t take part in decisions made by the in-crowd, while the young generations sit outside the system, clicking ‘refresh’ on job boards, as if playing a slot machine.

We tell them to reinvent themselves, but to what? Creative jobs? Copywriting? Social media management? Data science? Coding? The machine has taken all those roles too.

Where are they supposed to go?

 The real crisis of AI is not about superintelligence or singularity or even surveillance. When we look at our children and their children, we see that the real crisis is about disinheritance, the loss of entry and purpose, the erasure of beginnings.

We may think that we can run on for a long time with this. But we cannot and we need to address it. A society that denies its young a way in is not a society that lasts. It causes rot from the inside.

We need a reimagining of purpose. We need a return to value. And an admission that there must be space for humans to learn, to try, to stumble, to begin.

We mid-career people can run to higher ground or cling onto the last of the lifeboats. But the kids? They never got to board. We pulled up the gang plank – we did it - and sailed the ship away. And they were there, on the dock watching us unceremoniously depart. They watch us, we, the cowards, who sold our children out. We abandoned them. We broke the old pact, that each generation would lift the next. Now, there are no rungs left on the ladder, no first step, no path forward.

Now, instead of helping them into the world of work, of growth, of becoming, we feed them straight into the system we built to replace them.

That system is just circuitry. It is the cold hum that announces an inheritance denied.

This is the machine. This is a place that was never built for our children, but around them, closing them in.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson, Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025