What are the kids going to do? This week’s job losses are the ripple before the tsunami

February 28, 2026 — 5:00am

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Listening to the AI assistant fail to solve my problem, I thought there’s another job I’m glad my children didn’t train for: customer service. A real young adult could never be so obligingly unhelpful as this version of HAL-9000, and certainly wouldn’t come as cheap.

But a job is a job, and that one is gone. The wave of jobs taken over by artificial intelligence is breaking faster than expected. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 predicts 92 million jobs will be “displaced” by AI in the next four years. Unlike in previous industrial revolutions, the jobs being automated are middle-class, white-collar work requiring tertiary education.

Logistics giant WiseTech Global, Australia’s biggest listed tech company, this week announced that 29 per cent of its staff would be replaced by AI, chief executive Zubin Appoo noting that “the era of manually writing code as a core act of engineering is over”. Meanwhile, the world’s largest publisher of novels, Harlequin, began replacing human translators with AI. (Next? Human authors.) A 2025 Stanford University report found that employment in fields most exposed to AI, such as accountancy, administration, customer service and computer programming, had already dropped by 13 per cent since 2022.

These are the early ripples of a tsunami. Careers that looked solid last year are now as good as over. If a recent article by Matt Shumer, chief executive of OthersideAI, is anywhere near correct – and with more than 80 million views, it is already influencing perceptions – white-collar professions such as........

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