The problem comes if the number of years of experience you need to outperform the frontier AI models advances at more than 1 per year, which is not out of the question.
In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.
Is the taxpayer going to pay for another five or ten years of education for people? Are the young people expected to borrow hundreds of thousands more for training? Are their parents expected to house and feed them for another decade?
Not who, what. Most of the value in the economy is not produced by humans for a long time already. Most wealth comes from machines. So they need to be footing the bill instead of just lining pockets of people who bought the machines.
But nowadys with the culture being much more to to repeatedly jump between companies looking for salary increases, there's a lot less incentive to train juniors - because odds are they're just going to get poached or jump ship before that investment has really paid off.
The big companies or startups with VC funding and deep pockets will always be able to hire experienced people - but it's going to become increasingly hard for other people (and particularly public sector and nonprofits) to do so, as the pipeline of juniors -> seniors is being eroded.
In my observation, employers stopped being loyal to employees long before employees stopped being loyal to employers.
Business circumstances made it advantageous, and then necessary, to break the social contract.
It might be possible to go back, but I can't imagine any series of events that leads in that direction which doesn't break the global economy in the process.
And what are the odds that any given company is even going to be around for 40 years these days?
At smithinteriors, we often balance AI-driven tools with hands-on creative insights. But we also believe in giving junior designers a chance to learn and grow, because without mentorship and opportunity, there’ll never be enough experienced professionals in the future. It’s all about creating an environment where AI supports human creativity, not replaces it.