🤔 While everyone's debating who'll replace humans first - ChatGPT or Claude, Gen Z quietly made a different choice. They're going into construction, electrical work and plumbing - not because they can't do tech, but because they know how to weigh risks.
What's happening in the job market according to Goldman Sachs:
AI wipes out ~25,000 jobs in the US every month - creating only 9,000 back through "augmentation". Net loss: 16,000 positions a month. Gen Z gets hit the hardest: in industries with high AI exposure, the unemployment gap between under-30s and experienced 31-50 year-old workers has grown sharply. Companies are shutting the door themselves: the share of CEOs planning to cut entry-level hiring went from 17% to 43% in a year. Only 17% of executives are willing to prioritize entry-level roles - for the rest, AI covers those tasks cheaper.
Experts warn, though: mass closing of junior roles creates a "structural talent shortage" for the companies themselves. By denying young people the chance to grow, businesses lose their future senior specialists - and get more and more dependent on immature AI systems. A vicious circle.
Russia: what happened to youth resumes (2023-2026):
📌 Laborers (ages 14-18) - resumes up +1100% (from 1.5K to 16.5K)
📌 Packers and loaders - growth of +200-427%; couriers +100%
📌 Copywriters (ages 14-18) - down 59%. Programmers gave +40%, designers +50% - next to the explosive growth of physical jobs, that looks like stagnation
Globally - Gen Z has already pivoted:
✅ 42% of Gen Z work in or are actively learning skilled trades (ResumeBuilder, 2025)
✅ 40% of young graduates in 2025 deliberately choose construction, plumbing, electrical work as "AI-proof" professions
✅ +216,000 construction jobs have appeared in the US since 2022 - AI infrastructure needs people who build data centers with their hands
According to the WEF, physical professions are resilient because of "the physical variability of the environment and live interaction" - something an algorithm fundamentally can't scale. By 2030, the energy infrastructure for data centers will need another ~500,000 new specialists in the US alone.
⚡️ Data center builders earn as much as office juniors or more - and they don't get laid off next quarter for "AI optimization"
⭐️ Daron Acemoglu, MIT, 2024 Nobel laureate in Economics:
"The direction of AI matters enormously. Right now it's used mostly for automation that displaces workers without creating enough new tasks and jobs"
🎯 Honestly - Gen Z is making the right move. While everyone was discussing neural networks, they weighed the risks and went where AI still can't work with its hands. And the most ironic part: building the data centers that automate office workers is physical labor too. So the AI boom ends up creating demand for the very people it scares