What should I tell my children to do for a living as artificial intelligence takes over knowledge work?

Listening to the AI assistant fail to solve my problem, I thought there’s another job I’m glad my children didn’t train for: customer service. A real young adult could never be so obligingly unhelpful as this version of HAL-9000, and certainly wouldn’t come as cheap.

But a job is a job, and that one is gone. The wave of jobs taken over by artificial intelligence is breaking faster than expected. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 predicts 92 million jobs will be “displaced” by AI in the next four years. Unlike in previous industrial revolutions, the jobs being automated are middle-class, white-collar work requiring tertiary education.

Logistics giant WiseTech Global, Australia’s biggest listed tech company, this week announced that 29 per cent of its staff would be replaced by AI, chief executive Zubin Appoo noting that “the era of manually writing code as a core act of engineering is over”. Meanwhile, the world’s largest publisher of novels, Harlequin, began replacing human translators with AI. (Next? Human authors.) A 2025 Stanford University report found that employment in fields most exposed to AI, such as accountancy, administration, customer service and computer programming, had already dropped by 13 per cent since 2022.

These are the early ripples of a tsunami. Careers that looked solid last year are now as good as over. If a recent article by Matt Shumer, chief executive of OthersideAI, is anywhere near correct – and with more than 80 million views, it is already influencing perceptions – white-collar professions such as the law, accountancy and medicine are in different stages of automation. “The honest version” of how quickly AI is displacing jobs, writes Shumer, “sounds like I’ve lost my mind”.

The accelerating ability of AIs to build new AIs, he adds, means that “the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous … because it’s preventing people from preparing”. One reason for the gap is that the versions of AI most people use, or have contact with, such as my incompetent customer service chatbot or the Woolworths bot reportedly giving wrong prices and weird “banter”, are swiftly being upgraded. If we are dismissing AI because of its faultiness, we are missing the point. AI hallucinations or inaccuracies are just teething problems, the least of our problems.

Meanwhile, Paul Ford, a technologist writing for The New York Times, asked: “Would it surprise you to find out tomorrow that large technology consulting firms had just laid off 10,000 people? A hundred thousand? A million? The market keeps convulsing, and I wish we could hit the brakes. But we live in a brakeless era.”

There are obviously many implications here, but I want to focus on one, which is the severance of a contract between the generations.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, has predicted that 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear within one to five years. The key word is “entry-level”.

Many of us might have had a sanguine notion of AI replacing the most mundane functions: analysing masses of data, say, or writing basic copy, the lower end of knowledge work. Isn’t AI simply automating white-collar versions of factory labour? But, as Amodei – one of the handful of people worldwide with a hand on the AI tiller – indicates, these jobs are where careers begin. If there are no entry-level jobs, what is being left for the next generation?

Shumer illustrates the issue when he describes a friend of his, a managing partner at a law firm, adopting AIs that are “like having a team of associates available instantly”. This is the tenor of Shumer’s advice: people in senior positions have to use new AIs to stay ahead. Unfortunately, what this also means is that people in junior positions are no longer needed, a crucial step in gaining experience is removed, and there is no pathway for tomorrow’s senior knowledge workers.

What then becomes of the parent wanting to fulfil one of their oldest roles: giving their offspring career advice?

Parenting is an entry-level job if ever there was one. In a climate where AI is “happening to us”, as Shumer writes, and we have no idea about the next 12 months let alone a longer-term future, what do you tell your kids? When you advise a university degree, are you like the parent who recommended their children go into good solid trades such as lamp-lighting in the 1850s, elevator operating in the 1950s, Linotyping in the 1960s, stenography in the 1970s, encyclopaedia selling in the 1980s, or data processing in the 1990s?

All the truly responsible parent can say in 2026 is that we don’t have a clue. But the building trades are looking good. So is aged care, or landscape gardening, or food delivery …

I never imagined feeling so helpless as a parent. But it’s not just that. The automation of white-collar work, with the attendant transfer of wealth towards the owners of capital, is another aspect of an intergenerational divide that feels more and more like a brewing war. As if the illusion of home ownership, the destruction of the planet and the enormity of public and private debt were not enough of a burden to leave for the next generation, we can add a technological revolution that is making innumerable jobs (for which the next generation is training, and accumulating more personal debt) instantly redundant.

And the much-trumpeted efficiency dividends of AI, adding to profits and economic growth, flow away from workers towards owners and shareholders – that is, from the younger generation to the older.

What a legacy.

Lawmakers’ biggest challenge is how to justly distribute the AI dividend. How will Western governments stop their societies from mirroring those parts of the world where wealth booms were concentrated in the hands of the few, and accentuated inequality? Do today’s policymakers have any more idea than the rest of us? Is the American laissez-faire approach to AI – channel public funds to private enterprise and hope it trickles down – the default setting of a helpless, clueless governing class?

The effect of the AI revolution, at present, has been to produce hasty short-termism among the few and utter paralysis among the many. The intergenerational contract, to leave our children a world better than we found it, is broken. We don’t have any idea what our children will do, what jobs will be available for them, whether another era of mass unemployment is going to return, or if knowledge work itself is to become redundant.

Why would the younger generation not be hostile to what is being left for them? What deal will the older generation be offering – look after me until I die, and then you can have the house? If this were my future, I’d be more than Grace Tame-level “difficult”. I’d be in open insurrection.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist.