What Happens When AI Takes Away the First Rung of the Ladder?
AI can draft, code, analyse and summarise in seconds. But those are also the tasks through which beginners once learned to notice errors, test assumptions and develop professional judgment. This essay asks what happens when the first rung of the career ladder disappears, and why the future challenge may be less about job loss than experience. Can education and workplaces build a new apprenticeship for an age of machine fluency?