AI influence on the labor market: Young career starters as an early warning system

A year ago it was a guess, based on a single data set and worded with caution. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab published a finding in the summer of 2025 that was at odds with the debate at the time.

According to their data, it is not the broad mass of employees who are losing work due to artificial intelligence, but rather a narrow, clearly identifiable group, namely young people at the beginning of their careers in precisely those professions in which AI can take over tasks. They called their paper “Canaries in the Coal Mine,” after the canaries that served as an early warning system in mining.