I was chatting with my mother last week, and she mentioned the weavers of Bengal.
Not as history. As family memory, the way an older generation talks about things their grandparents lived through. Dhaka muslin had once been the finest textile in the world, exported across Europe, Asia, and the Arab world for centuries. Then the Industrial Revolution arrived. Manchester mills, British tariffs against Indian cotton, and a few decades later, the weavers of Bengal — generations of inherited craft, an entire economic ecosystem — were destitute. The skill did not save them. The market for the skill simply went away.
I have been thinking about that conversation ever since. Because I am also a professor at a business school, and the question I get asked most often, by students and by parents of students, is some version of: what should they study, what should they do, how should they prepare for the workforce of tomorrow?
And I do not have an honest answer that is also a comfortable one.
The thing we cannot keep saying
For two years, the comfortable position in education circles has been that AI is a productivity tool. That it will augmentknowledge workers, not replace them. That the disruption will be gradual, manageable, similar to other technology cycles.
That position is becoming harder to hold honestly.
In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic — one of the companies actually building this technology — told Axios that AI could eliminate roughly 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years, and push unemployment to between 10 per cent and 20 per cent. He named tech, finance, law, and consulting specifically. The line that has stayed with me: “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen.”
A year later, the data is moving in that direction. Big Tech hiring of new graduates has dropped roughly 50 per cent from pre-pandemic levels, according to venture firm SignalFire. Wall Street banks have announced cuts concentrated in entry-level analyst seats. Tech entry-level hiring fell 30–50 per cent across 2025. The first rung of the white-collar ladder is the one being sawed off.
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This is not the metaverse. This is not crypto. Those were narratives in search of use cases. What is happening now is the opposite — capability arriving faster than the use cases, faster than the labour market, faster than education systems can adapt. Every senior leader I speak with this year is seeing it inside their own organisation.
And the next wave is physical
The instinct so far has been to tell young people: go into the trades. Become a plumber or an electrician. The body is safe even if the desk job is not.
I do not think we get to say that for much longer, either.
Self-driving vehicles, until recently a punchline, are now running commercial robotaxi services in multiple cities across the US and China. Humanoid robotics that two years ago could barely walk are now folding laundry and stocking shelves in pilots. The combination — large models meeting physical actuators — is what people in the field are starting to call physical AI. It is at roughly the stage knowledge AI was at in 2022. Look at how far that has come in three years.
I am not predicting that plumbers will disappear by 2030. I am saying I am no longer willing to tell a sixteen-year-old that physical work is a permanent moat. The honest answer is we don’t know. And the pace at which that answer keeps moving makes any specific prediction we make today suspect by next year.
What we cannot predict, and what that means
Here is the other half of the honesty.
The most lucrative careers of the last twenty years are the ones nobody in 2005 could have advised a child to prepare for. The full-time YouTuber. The Twitch streamer. The prompt engineer. The TikTok creator earns more than a partner at a top consultancy. The DevOps engineer. The growth marketer. The mobile app indie developer. None of these was on a syllabus. None had a college pathway. The most we could have done in 2005 was say: the internet seems important; learn to use it, follow your interests, be ready to invent the rest.
This will be true again. Almost certainly more so. There will be wealth, professions, and entire categories of human work that we cannot picture from here and that will become obvious in retrospect. The graduates of 2026 are going to invent jobs we do not yet have words for.
This is the strangely hopeful part of the answer. The thing we cannot do is hand them a map. The thing we can do is make sure they are equipped to draw one.
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What I tell graduates now
I have stopped trying to point to specific professions as safe harbours. Instead, I share three things, in roughly this order.
Become fluent with AI before it becomes furniture
Not as a search engine. As a thinking partner, a builder, a critic, a research team in your pocket. The graduates who treat AI as a tool to dodge will be displaced by the graduates who treat it as a force multiplier. The latter group is small today. It will be the entry condition tomorrow.
Build judgment around something you genuinely care about
AI is flattening the cost of producing anything; what becomes scarce is taste, judgment, and the ability to decide what is worth producing. That cannot be taught from a syllabus. It is built by going deep on something — a craft, a domain, a question — that you would care about even if nobody paid you for it. The depth becomes the platform from which you can leverage AI. Breadth without depth produces nothing memorable.
Expect to reinvent yourself, and treat it as normal
My generation built careers around the idea that you would do one thing well for thirty years. The next generation will need to be comfortable doing several things across thirty years, with two-to-three-year reinvention cycles. This is uncomfortable to us. It is not, it turns out, uncomfortable to them. The teenagers I meet are already pattern-matching to this faster than their parents are.
What my mother actually said
After we talked about the weavers, my mother said something I keep returning to. She said the weavers’ children eventually found new ways to live. Not the same way. Not as wealthy, not for a long time. But Bengal did not end with the looms. Something else came after.
That is the most honest thing I can say to a young person right now. The looms you were trained for are changing under your feet. We do not know exactly what comes next. But something will. And the people who do best in any disruption are the ones who stop arguing with the change and start positioning for what is on the other side of it.
The youth I meet are already doing this. Quietly, mostly without us. They do not need us to predict their future. They need us to be honest about ours.
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