It might be a little simplistic to draw a straight line between the emergence of generative artificial intelligence and the slowdown in graduate recruitment by Irish professional services firms but the latter has definitely sent a shiver down the spine of south Co Dublin.
The well-trodden path to privilege, or at least being able to buy a house as big as your parents’, is under threat. Private school, a degree in commerce or business, economics and social studies followed by a graduate placement with one of the big accountancy and law firms – or a job in finance – is not the birthright it once was. Even University College Dublin’s much coveted economics and finance course is no longer an assured route to finance bro-dom.
Irish firms are being coy about the extent to which they have cut back on graduate recruitment, but much will be revealed in the coming months as the recruitment process swings into gear.
Their UK peers have no such qualms. KPMG in the UK has slashed graduate recruitment by 33 per cent, while Deloitte has reduced its graduate hiring programme by 18 per cent. Ernst & Young cut graduate roles by 11 per cent, while PwC reduced graduate hires by 6 per cent – the reason being AI, according to recruiters Morgan McKinley.
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To what extent is the pullback a step change or a case of waiting to see if AI lives up to its hype is unclear. James Reed, chair of Reed, one of the world’s largest family-run recruitment firms, is pessimistic.
He told the Other Voices festival in Dingle late last year that the number of graduate jobs advertised on Reed’s UK website had fallen by two thirds and that AI was the main reason for thousands of graduate roles disappearing.
He cannot see how AI will create new jobs for them and the transition will be “extremely disruptive in the traditional sense of that word, and potentially catastrophic, with huge social and political consequences, including the rise of extremism and threatening the functioning of society”.
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Reed’s concerns and those of aspirant professionals of south Co Dublin and their parents cut to the heart of the paradox at the centre of the AI boom; its potential to eat itself.
The yet unanswered question is how the trillions of dollars borrowed to “build out” AI with massive data centres to run bigger and faster large language models will be repaid if the likes of Open AI, Anthropic and Google end up putting the customers of their customers out of work.
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At the end of every AI-enhanced value chain there must be a customer and that – for the moment – means a person who has a job. And the better the job, the more valuable a customer they will be. But, almost by definition, anyone who holds on to their job in the coming AI “utopia” will not need AI for their job.
For an industry that seems to have taken so much of its business plan from science fiction fantasy novels and films, it seems to have forgotten the bit where humans turn off the machines.
The notion of an AI doom loop is an interesting but largely hypothetical scenario that nobody seems very interested in addressing at the moment. But it is becoming more and more real, as the aspirant members of the Irish professional classes will tell you.
The AI industry is whistling past the graveyard, but the consensus seems to be that entry-level white-collar jobs will be lost, but AI-based innovation will create new jobs. Dario Amodi, the head of Anthropic, has predicted US unemployment could hit 20 per cent in the next five years.
The industry is equally sanguine about how the debt mountain being built up on the back of this rather shaky premise will be serviced amid 20 per cent unemployment. Jensen Huang of Nvidia – whose chips are powering the boom – says it’s an issue for his customers. His customers spent the best part of last year making it an issue for everybody, sucking billions of dollars out of the private and public credit markets into off-balance sheet vehicles.
The potential exists for an Enron-meets-the-financial-crash moment and Michael Burry, the investor who famously shorted the US housing bubble, has predicted it will all end in tears.
Few others are willing to challenge the new AI orthodoxy for fear of being seen as luddites – the skilled artisans who smashed up the machines taking their jobs during the industrial revolution.
It is hard to see the professional classes of south Co Dublin marching on data centres in west Dublin and burning them to the ground. But now that the reality of what AI entails has hit home, they might be more supportive when their offspring express a preference for the woodwork option rather than applied maths in transition year.
