The end of labor and the rise of AI natives

Yeom Jae-ho

The author is the president of Taejae University.

According to economic statistics from 2025, approximately 480,000 university graduates were unemployed, 270,000 young people were actively seeking work without success and another 270,000 had given up looking for employment altogether. The Ministry of Education’s 2024 statistics indicate that the employment rate for graduates of four-year universities stood at only 62.8 percent. Young people are bearing the brunt of the AI era.

Palantir in the United States has begun hiring high school graduates for entry-level positions, while SK Group is shifting its recruitment process toward in-depth interviews that evaluate AI proficiency regardless of academic credentials. Microsoft and other major technology companies are also conducting large-scale layoffs of software engineers and other information technology professionals. The 20th-century system, in which educational attainment and academic major largely determined career prospects, is coming to an end. AI is rapidly replacing work traditionally performed by white-collar and professional workers, while Physical AI is increasingly taking over tasks in manufacturing and other blue-collar occupations.

In 2017, Dell, through its Institute for the Future report, predicted that 85 percent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 had not yet been invented. In 2025, the World Economic Forum projected that by 2030, 22 percent of all jobs worldwide would be transformed: While 92 million jobs would disappear, 170 million new ones would emerge. The shelf life of 20th-century professional expertise has expired.

More than 30 years ago, Jeremy Rifkin predicted in "The End of Work" (1995) that the meaning and value of labor would fundamentally change in the 21st century. In reality, the model of working for a company in exchange for a monthly salary occupies only a brief period in human history.

For most of history, people worked directly for their own livelihoods. Industrialization transformed labor into wage employment organized around specialized expertise. Karl Marx described this as the alienation of labor. AI is now dismantling that 20th-century model.

The AI era is now transforming this way of life from the ground up. Tasks that involve repetitive application of standardized and codified knowledge can now be performed far more effectively by AI. Physical AI can operate on production lines continuously, 24 hours a day, without interruption. In the future, competitiveness will no longer come from simply using AI to retrieve information efficiently. Instead, individuals must become AI natives.

Just as computer users eventually stopped drafting on paper and began thinking directly through digital tools, workers must move beyond simply using AI and instead think, plan and create with AI. This is what it means to become an AI native. To achieve this, many university graduates will need a new form of education that enables them to go beyond their academic majors and become AI natives.

After World War II, the United States anticipated that approximately eight million returning service members would face unemployment. To prevent a massive employment crisis, the U.S. Congress enacted the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, widely known as the G.I. Bill. The bill funded higher education, vocational training, living expenses, and housing loans. Nearly 8 million veterans received education or training, helping expand the middle class in the United States and fueling decades of economic growth. It remains one of the most successful public investments in modern history. Although the program required annual public expenditures equivalent to roughly 0.3 percent of GDP, the subsequent increase in college-educated workers substantially boosted federal income tax revenues.

The Korean government should invest the increase in corporate tax revenues generated by the exceptional operating profits of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix into retraining university graduates to become AI natives. In 2025, Korea’s Local Education Grant allocated to elementary, middle, and high schools amounted to approximately 72 trillion won ($50 billion), linked to 20.79 percent of national tax revenues, whereas the Ministry of Education’s budget for higher education totaled only 16 trillion won. It is well known that public spending on primary and secondary education exceeds the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average by approximately 40 percent, while support for higher education reaches only 44 percent of the OECD average. Rather than continuing to expand investment in standardized primary and secondary education, Korea’s future competitiveness depends on differentiated investment in higher education. If the government continues to tolerate inefficient spending in public primary and secondary education — even as private tutoring expenditures continue to rise — while neglecting higher education on the assumption that its costs should be borne primarily by students, the nation’s future will be bleak.

The Presidential Office recently established a "senior secretary for youth future" to address the challenges facing younger generations. If this initiative is to be more than a symbolic political gesture, it must be accompanied by substantive policies. As the AI era fundamentally transforms the nature of work, Korea urgently needs a bold national strategy to retrain university graduates as AI natives and address youth unemployment through a comprehensive, forward-looking government agenda.