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.
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.
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.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-raises-hiring...
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.
My whisper network has talked about cutting junior hires in computer-touching 60, 70, 80%
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
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
Interest rates are high by recent historical standards. Something does not need to be sustainable for the transition to be painful.
FRED: Federal Funds Effective Rate (FEDFUNDS) - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds
How Did Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) Affect Software Developer Jobs? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730161 - September 2026
What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39193331 - January 2024 (169 comments)
that's exactly the point I'm making, recency bias, it contorts our perceptions
Is your thesis that interest rates have no relation to job openings and hiring?