No AI apocalypse for the young

According to Conor Sen the age 20-24 unemployment rate is for now unchanged since the AI boom began

According to economy analyst Conor Sen, there is some genuinely good news in the labor data: the sky has not fallen on younger workers all at once. If Americans aged 20 to 24 have not, in the aggregate, seen their employment collapse during the first great wave of the AI boom, that is worth acknowledging. It means the apocalyptic predictions were, at least for now, overstated.

But Catholics should resist the temptation to draw false comfort from that fact.

The right conclusion is not that AI poses no threat to young workers. It is that the threat is arriving unevenly. The damage may be real without yet being universal. Some sectors, especially those most exposed to automating entry-level cognitive work, may already be narrowing the first rung of the ladder, even while the broader labor market still holds up. That is often how historical disruptions begin: not with total collapse, but with selective pressure that only later becomes visible to everyone.

So yes, this is a good sign. It suggests that human labor, even among the young, remains more resilient than some prophets of doom imagined. But it is only a provisional good sign. It should make us grateful, not complacent.

From a Catholic perspective, that distinction matters. We should welcome evidence that young workers are not being swept away wholesale. Work remains one of the ordinary paths by which a young man or woman enters adult responsibility, develops discipline, and begins to imagine family life. If that path is still open for many, that is no small mercy.

At the same time, faith should push us beyond relief and toward responsibility. If the first rung of the ladder is under pressure in some parts of the economy, then the answer is not merely to hope the aggregate numbers stay decent. The answer is to speed up the work of reinvention: new forms of apprenticeship, new paths into meaningful work, new institutions of training, and new jobs built around genuinely human capacities that machines do not replace so easily.

In that sense, the current data should be read as a warning wrapped in a consolation. The labor market for younger workers has not collapsed. Good. But that only gives us a little time. And Catholics should know what to do with time: use it well, act creatively, and refuse to wait until the wound is deeper before building the remedies.