What happens to young workers if the bubble pops?

People are talking a lot about the AI the bubble but they’re talking less about what happens to young workers if/when it pops.

I mean, think about it.

When longtime professionals use AI to do a task, they’re delegating. They learned how to do the task years ago and if AI isn’t available they can still do it the old-fashioned way.

But young professionals who’ve relied on AI for the entirety of their careers, they aren’t delegating, they’re substituting.

For them, AI has always made the judgments and their brains have never formed the neural pathways a brain needs to function at a high level without AI.

There’s a term for this: “skill foreclosure.” It’s when young workers evolve with AI and bypass the initial learning phase, which prevents the brain from building the neurological infrastructure for reasoning.

So what happens at companies if/when AI gets pulled away?

There’s a term for that too: “competency cliff.” Productivity falls off because firms have built the ground floor of their workforce on a prompt box.