Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-raises-hiring...

Liminal Capital, an investment firm, estimated in August that about a third of jobs appear to be more exposed to substitution than augmentation by A.I. In those occupations, new hires among workers ages 22 to 25 have fallen by a third since 2021, even as firings have barely budged.

Their paper: https://www.liminal-capital.com/documents/liminal-ai-jobs-im...

I'm skeptical of the quality/bias of this, given the source. That said, the story makes sense to me at a high level. Even without the current ML expansion, general trends in automation and maturity & consolidation of the tech sector seemed to be generating a similar effect.

Nah, employers are holding wages down due to interest rates and the cost of money. AI is the excuse. Workers have no bargaining power for higher wages without a union, so they are powerless to demand higher wages unless they are in a unique situation. Same reason productivity is going up, rolling layoffs requiring those who remain to do more with less, which increases productivity metrics. Short term profits are being prioritized over on boarding, developing, and training fresh/junior folks.

Michigan Insurance Giant Blames "AI" for Layoffs–But Evidence Points Overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365161 - August 2026

My investigation points to a far more conventional explanation: Acrisure is shifting work once performed by American employees to lower-cost operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia.

What's Liminal Capital's portfolio look like? I would like to see if they're talking their book versus objective productivity data.

Interest rates are not that high, once you move beyond this century's period of near-zero rates which was never sustainable