Nye's Digital Lab publishes weekly on the intersection of technology, creativity, and the systems we build to make sense of both.

This week I am considering the societal transition period we are in, and how we should be adapting education to teach for it.

There are two stories we keep hearing about the future.

Story One:

AI is coming for white collar work. Entry level jobs disappear first, then middle management, then whole departments. A generation of credentialed graduates finds the careers they trained for automated into irrelevance. Doom loop. Economic destabilization. The end of the professional class as we know it.

Story Two:

Relax. Abundance is coming. AI compresses the cost of knowledge work the same way electricity compressed the cost of manufacturing. New markets open! New jobs emerge! The economy expands in ways nobody can predict yet, but it always does. It always has. History says so!

Which one is right? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Probably some uncomfortable combination of the two.

But neither story helps the student whose eyes I'm looking into when they realize the world they prepared for has already moved.

That student is sitting in my classroom right now. She picked the right major. He worked hard, graduated on time, built the portfolio, did everything the institution implied would be sufficient. And the market they're walking into has structurally changed. Companies have quietly stopped back-filling the entry level roles that used to be the first rung of every professional career path.

Over 40% of white collar job seekers in 2024 failed to secure a single interview.[1] More than 40% of recent graduates are working jobs that don't require their degrees.[2] Big Tech cut new graduate hiring by 25% in a single year.[3] These aren't the numbers of a temporary slowdown.

They're the shape of a transition already underway. And the end-state arguments, abundance or collapse, give that student nothing to work with on Monday morning.

So let's talk about Monday morning.

Every major technological shift in history has had a middle period.

The steam engine created industrial capitalism, but it also created decades of instability before the benefits distributed broadly. The internet genuinely transformed everything, but it also gutted mid-sized cities built around industries it made obsolete, produced a decade of stagnant wages, and left a specific generation of workers holding credentials for jobs that no longer existed.

AI is doing the same thing, just much much faster. That speed is the variable that changes everything about how education should respond.

The internet's transition unfolded over roughly twenty years. Painful, but navigable. Institutions had time to adapt. Workers had time to retrain. New industries had time to scale up and absorb displaced labor.

The current AI compression is happening in what feels like weeks. McKinsey estimates 375 million workers globally will need significant retraining by 2030.[4] Anthropic's own CEO has said nearly half of all entry level white collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting could be eliminated or fundamentally changed within five years.[5]

What that means for a student is concrete and immediate. The entry level job that used to serve as the apprenticeship is the first thing to compress. Junior analyst. Junior lawyer. Entry level marketer. Junior developer. These roles existed not just because companies needed cheap labor. They existed because they were how industries reproduced professional judgment.

You learned to think like a lawyer by doing the research. You learned to think like a strategist by doing the powerpoint decks. Remove those rungs and the ladder doesn't just get shorter. It gets harder to climb from the bottom.

The students who are going to be fine are not the ones who picked the safest major. They're the ones who learned to operate like a small business before they ever needed to.

And that's exactly how we, as educators, should respond.

Think about what a scrappy small business owner actually does.

They wear every hat. They make decisions with incomplete information. They read the market, adjust quickly, and build things rather than wait for permission to build them. They can't afford to specialize so narrowly that one disruption takes them out. They know how to find resources, assemble temporary teams, ship something real, and iterate on what they learn.

That's not a description of how most college students are taught to operate. It's a description of how the most resilient ones will need to.

The abundance scenario, if it arrives, will be most accessible to people who think this way. Consider the legal example. AI is rapidly compressing the cost of legal research, document review, and contract drafting. For a small business owner who couldn't previously afford a lawyer at all, affordable AI-assisted legal guidance is effectively a tax incentive. It lowers the cost of operating.

The same logic applies across healthcare administration, accounting, marketing, compliance, and financial planning. That leverage is what education should be building toward.

Students who have shipped things, meaning they have actually built and deployed games, apps, campaigns, experiences, businesses, community projects, arrive in the job market with evidence of judgment, not just knowledge.

That distinction is going to matter more with every passing year of this transition.

The abundance future may well arrive. New categories of work may open that we can't fully imagine yet. The optimists are probably right about the long arc. (I sure hope so.)

But you can't live in the long arc. You have a graduation date. You have loan payments starting six months after commencement. The long arc is a nice story for economists. You need something you can use on Monday.

Education sits in a specific kind of contradiction right now. It is simultaneously one of the institutions most exposed to AI disruption and one of the only institutions with the scale, credibility, and direct access to actually help people navigate disruption. That tension needs to be resolved honestly, starting with what we tell students.

And to my students, this is what I genuinely believe:

There will be more startups and more small businesses in the next ten years than we can possibly imagine.

Every person with an idea and the ability to move fast will find themselves, like I did in my career (and not entirely by choice), in the middle of building something. The tools to do it are cheaper and more accessible than they have ever been. The barriers to putting something in front of real users have essentially collapsed.

The students who will thrive are not the ones waiting for the right job to open up. They're the ones who already know how to make something, show it to someone, and figure out what to do next. They're the ones who've already failed at something and then, get back up.

The startup classroom is not a radical idea. It's just education that takes the actual moment seriously. Building makers instead of applicants. Building people who can operate in uncertainty rather than people who were prepared for certainty that no longer exists.

The transition is the assignment. We need to start treating it that way.

Hey! That’s it for this time. I do this every week, if you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. If you like tech-detoxing with a book like I do, I crammed some of last years best essays into a printed collection.

This essay was built from my personal knowledge base in Obsidian / Claude Code. Final sweetening was done with Claude Sonnet 4.5. Images created in Flow State with Leonardo.ai.

For more info visit: https://nyewarburton.com

We’ll see you next time.

• Agile as Educational Opportunity, Feb 7, 2026

• Finding Passion in China, Nov 30, 2025

• Projects with Purpose, Oct 26, 2025

[^1]: American Staffing Association / The Harris Poll, Workforce Monitor, November 2024. Survey of 2,077 U.S. adults found 4 in 10 unemployed job seekers had not secured a single interview in the prior 12 months. Reported in Fortune and confirmed by ASA directly.

[^2]: Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, as reported in Medium / Reuven Gorsht: recent college graduates face 4.8% unemployment with over 41% working jobs that don't require their degrees.

[^3]: SignalFire, State of Tech Talent Report 2025, tracking LinkedIn data on 650 million professionals. Big Tech new graduate hires fell 25% in 2024 vs. 2023, and are down over 50% from pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Reported in TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.

[^4]: McKinsey Global Institute, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation, 2017. The report estimates between 75 million and 375 million workers globally may need to switch occupational categories by 2030. The 375 million figure represents the high-end scenario. McKinsey.

[^5]: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, speaking to Axios, May 2025: AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10-20%. Axios, Fortune, CNN.

Nye's Digital Lab publishes weekly on the intersection of technology, creativity, and the systems we build to make sense of both.

This week I am considering the societal transition period we are in, and how we should be adapting education to teach for it.

There are two stories we keep hearing about the future.

Story One:

AI is coming for white collar work. Entry level jobs disappear first, then middle management, then whole departments. A generation of credentialed graduates finds the careers they trained for automated into irrelevance. Doom loop. Economic destabilization. The end of the professional class as we know it.

Story Two:

Relax. Abundance is coming. AI compresses the cost of knowledge work the same way electricity compressed the cost of manufacturing. New markets open! New jobs emerge! The economy expands in ways nobody can predict yet, but it always does. It always has. History says so!

Which one is right? Maybe both. Maybe neither. Probably some uncomfortable combination of the two.

But neither story helps the student whose eyes I'm looking into when they realize the world they prepared for has already moved.

That student is sitting in my classroom right now. She picked the right major. He worked hard, graduated on time, built the portfolio, did everything the institution implied would be sufficient. And the market they're walking into has structurally changed. Companies have quietly stopped back-filling the entry level roles that used to be the first rung of every professional career path.

Over 40% of white collar job seekers in 2024 failed to secure a single interview.[1] More than 40% of recent graduates are working jobs that don't require their degrees.[2] Big Tech cut new graduate hiring by 25% in a single year.[3] These aren't the numbers of a temporary slowdown.

They're the shape of a transition already underway. And the end-state arguments, abundance or collapse, give that student nothing to work with on Monday morning.

So let's talk about Monday morning.

Every major technological shift in history has had a middle period.

The steam engine created industrial capitalism, but it also created decades of instability before the benefits distributed broadly. The internet genuinely transformed everything, but it also gutted mid-sized cities built around industries it made obsolete, produced a decade of stagnant wages, and left a specific generation of workers holding credentials for jobs that no longer existed.

AI is doing the same thing, just much much faster. That speed is the variable that changes everything about how education should respond.

The internet's transition unfolded over roughly twenty years. Painful, but navigable. Institutions had time to adapt. Workers had time to retrain. New industries had time to scale up and absorb displaced labor.

The current AI compression is happening in what feels like weeks. McKinsey estimates 375 million workers globally will need significant retraining by 2030.[4] Anthropic's own CEO has said nearly half of all entry level white collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting could be eliminated or fundamentally changed within five years.[5]

What that means for a student is concrete and immediate. The entry level job that used to serve as the apprenticeship is the first thing to compress. Junior analyst. Junior lawyer. Entry level marketer. Junior developer. These roles existed not just because companies needed cheap labor. They existed because they were how industries reproduced professional judgment.

You learned to think like a lawyer by doing the research. You learned to think like a strategist by doing the powerpoint decks. Remove those rungs and the ladder doesn't just get shorter. It gets harder to climb from the bottom.

The students who are going to be fine are not the ones who picked the safest major. They're the ones who learned to operate like a small business before they ever needed to.

And that's exactly how we, as educators, should respond.

Think about what a scrappy small business owner actually does.

They wear every hat. They make decisions with incomplete information. They read the market, adjust quickly, and build things rather than wait for permission to build them. They can't afford to specialize so narrowly that one disruption takes them out. They know how to find resources, assemble temporary teams, ship something real, and iterate on what they learn.

That's not a description of how most college students are taught to operate. It's a description of how the most resilient ones will need to.

The abundance scenario, if it arrives, will be most accessible to people who think this way. Consider the legal example. AI is rapidly compressing the cost of legal research, document review, and contract drafting. For a small business owner who couldn't previously afford a lawyer at all, affordable AI-assisted legal guidance is effectively a tax incentive. It lowers the cost of operating.

The same logic applies across healthcare administration, accounting, marketing, compliance, and financial planning. That leverage is what education should be building toward.

Students who have shipped things, meaning they have actually built and deployed games, apps, campaigns, experiences, businesses, community projects, arrive in the job market with evidence of judgment, not just knowledge.

That distinction is going to matter more with every passing year of this transition.

The abundance future may well arrive. New categories of work may open that we can't fully imagine yet. The optimists are probably right about the long arc. (I sure hope so.)

But you can't live in the long arc. You have a graduation date. You have loan payments starting six months after commencement. The long arc is a nice story for economists. You need something you can use on Monday.

Education sits in a specific kind of contradiction right now. It is simultaneously one of the institutions most exposed to AI disruption and one of the only institutions with the scale, credibility, and direct access to actually help people navigate disruption. That tension needs to be resolved honestly, starting with what we tell students.

And to my students, this is what I genuinely believe:

There will be more startups and more small businesses in the next ten years than we can possibly imagine.

Every person with an idea and the ability to move fast will find themselves, like I did in my career (and not entirely by choice), in the middle of building something. The tools to do it are cheaper and more accessible than they have ever been. The barriers to putting something in front of real users have essentially collapsed.

The students who will thrive are not the ones waiting for the right job to open up. They're the ones who already know how to make something, show it to someone, and figure out what to do next. They're the ones who've already failed at something and then, get back up.

The startup classroom is not a radical idea. It's just education that takes the actual moment seriously. Building makers instead of applicants. Building people who can operate in uncertainty rather than people who were prepared for certainty that no longer exists.

The transition is the assignment. We need to start treating it that way.

Hey! That’s it for this time. I do this every week, if you vibe to the ideas I express, consider subscribing or sharing with friends. If you like tech-detoxing with a book like I do, I crammed some of last years best essays into a printed collection.

This essay was built from my personal knowledge base in Obsidian / Claude Code. Final sweetening was done with Claude Sonnet 4.5. Images created in Flow State with Leonardo.ai.

For more info visit: https://nyewarburton.com

We’ll see you next time.

• Agile as Educational Opportunity, Feb 7, 2026

• Finding Passion in China, Nov 30, 2025

• Projects with Purpose, Oct 26, 2025

[^1]: American Staffing Association / The Harris Poll, Workforce Monitor, November 2024. Survey of 2,077 U.S. adults found 4 in 10 unemployed job seekers had not secured a single interview in the prior 12 months. Reported in Fortune and confirmed by ASA directly.

[^2]: Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, as reported in Medium / Reuven Gorsht: recent college graduates face 4.8% unemployment with over 41% working jobs that don't require their degrees.

[^3]: SignalFire, State of Tech Talent Report 2025, tracking LinkedIn data on 650 million professionals. Big Tech new graduate hires fell 25% in 2024 vs. 2023, and are down over 50% from pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Reported in TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.

[^4]: McKinsey Global Institute, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation, 2017. The report estimates between 75 million and 375 million workers globally may need to switch occupational categories by 2030. The 375 million figure represents the high-end scenario. McKinsey.

[^5]: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, speaking to Axios, May 2025: AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10-20%. Axios, Fortune, CNN.