Jobs - Jobs - Jobs

AI doesn't replace all people. It replaces beginners.

In 1780s Paris, coffeehouses overflowed with unemployed lawyers, 60,000 educated youth with worthless degrees. Louis XVI's bankrupt government had frozen hiring while aristocrats hoarded remaining positions.

These graduates, versed in revolutionary thought of Rousseau and Voltaire yet structurally excluded, watched their expensive education collect dust alongside empty promises.

"We have followed society's path only to find ourselves at a wall," one young lawyer scrawled in the cahiers de doléances, the grievance notebooks of 1789. 

Four years later, these intellectuals transformed from coffee-sipping graduates to architects of a new social order.

A devastating New York Times investigation reveals computer science graduates now face 7.5% unemployment, higher than art history majors at 3%

One Oregon State graduate applied to 5,762 tech jobs. Thirteen interviews. Zero offers. 

Another Purdue graduate with perfect credentials got one callback: Chipotle.

AI eliminates the entry points while preserving positions for those already inside. The traditional first rung:  junior developer, analyst, researcher, vanishes beneath graduates' feet as they reach for it.

Yet, employment represents just the first of multiple exclusions facing this generation.

Record student debt creates modern-day indentured servants. Housing costs devour 60% of income in major cities. Loneliness reaches epidemic levels with 80% of Gen Z reporting profound isolation. Political polarization blocks collective solutions, while traditional sources of meaning dissolve.

What happens when society educates an entire generation for positions that no longer exist?

In France, excluded intellectuals formulated new ideas, organized collective action, and eventually stormed the Bastille. The guillotine became their final response as 17,000 were publicly executed in the Reign of Terror, including aristocrats, officials, and gatekeepers who had preserved the old order.

The 2020's carry the same markers, but the moment of reckoning has not yet arrived.

When it comes - and it will come - what form might it take?

What structures will emerge from this generational awakening? What institutions will adapt, and which will be swept away?

The pattern is unmistakable. The timeline uncertain.

 But exclusion always creates its own response.