Are we facing an AI jobs apocalypse?
Police in Cornwall are on the hunt for a masked vandal seen on CCTV spraying “AI will take our jobs” across multiple sites in the villages of Polbathic, Widegates and Crafthole.
Is this vigilante right to warn us all? Ask Chat GPT whether AI will lead to a jobs apocalypse and the answer is suspiciously reassuring. “Every major general-purpose technology has triggered the same fear,” it says, “but ultimately created more work than it eliminated.” It would say that, wouldn’t it?
Perhaps I’m guilty of endowing it with a duplicitous nature that it cannot possess, but there’s no doubt that many people do fear a future in which it’s just easier, cheaper and more productive to lean on AI than it is to hire, train and manage a pesky human with their penchant for lunch breaks and pensions.
While disruption is inevitable, one of the main impacts that AI is having on the current labour market is that demand for tech expertise is through the roof. According to TotalJobs, mentions of tech-related capabilities in UK job adverts rose 12 per cent between 2024 and 2025, and one in four recruiters now rank AI as the most valuable skill when determining pay or a promotion. Two-thirds of tech workers received a pay rise in the last 12 months, well above the national average. Separate research by Robert Half finds that 56 per cent of UK firms have plans to expand their tech teams in the first half of 2026.
Most analysts, including those at the World Bank, say entry level and graduate jobs are most vulnerable to AI replacement, but the debate is far from settled.
Oxford Economics yesterday published a note saying they are “sceptical that firms can quickly and seamlessly substitute workers with AI even in sectors where the potential for AI disruption is greatest.” They say that “firms don’t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale” and that if they were, it “stands to reason that measures of labour productivity should be increasing, as the same output is produced with fewer workers.”
This doesn’t appear to be happening, at least not yet.
As things stand, employment taxes and increased labour costs are a far bigger driver of unemployment than AI. The Cornish graffiti artist may have a point, but they should probably insert some caveats into their work.