Fire the interns, lose the future

Here's the thing about junior employees: they're annoying, slow, and expensive to train. They ask too many questions. They definitely don't know what a "synergy" is yet.

They're also the only reason your company will have a workforce in twenty years.

An MIT researcher is warning companies about a trap they're cheerfully walking into: automating away entry-level jobs because AI can technically do them cheaper and faster. Seems smart. Spreadsheet-approved. Line goes up.

Except entry-level jobs were never really about the tasks. They were about the training. That's how a 22-year-old who can barely operate the coffee machine eventually becomes the 45-year-old who runs the department, makes the big calls, and mentors the next batch of confused 22-year-olds.

Skip that step, and you don't get a leaner company. You get a company with a brain and no spinal cord — brilliant senior leadership, sophisticated AI tools, and absolutely nobody in the pipeline who knows how anything actually works.

It's the corporate version of eating your seed corn. Feels great this harvest. Catastrophic by the next one.

And Gen Z, for their part, are noticing they're being quietly squeezed out of the exact jobs that used to be the industry's front door. Which means companies aren't just risking their own future bench — they're teaching an entire generation not to bother knocking.

Automate the grunt work, sure. But somebody still has to grow up to do the thinking. Right now, nobody's being handed the chance.

Distilled from Futurology Subreddit