Nick Cohen on AI 20 March 2026

 London, like New York, Hong Kong, Paris and San Francisco was once a city for the young. You would arrive from the rest of the UK, as I did, or from the rest of the world, as so many migrants have done, and put up with extortionate rents and congested commutes because London was where the jobs were.

There were other attractions, of course: arts, night life, restaurants, and vast numbers of other young people – some of whom might even be persuaded to like you.

But the jobs led the way. Like so many great cities London was a concertina. Work would suck in the young. They would find love, hook up, have kids and move out into cheaper homes with extra bedrooms in the commuter belt.

But now the music has stopped and London is enduring extraordinary rates of youth unemployment, which will only get higher as AI reorganises the world.

At the moment, our politicians cannot cope. Look at the two front runners for the next US presidential race in 2028. Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California and the leading Democrat, has been a friend of big tech. He watered down demands in the state to protect data privacy and regulate AI.

J.D. Vance, who may be the Republican candidate, was funded by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who endorses radical right movements. Only this week he was revealed to have been burbling about how the “Antichrist is not necessarily a person but could come as a global government system” – perhaps with satanic designs to regulate tech monopolists – such as himself.

Honestly, if beggars on the street were ranting about the “antichrist,” the police would pull them in. But the superrich get away with lunacies that damn the poor.

I could give you all the old reasons to be wary of politicians who are close to corrupt and frankly unhinged tech barons. But AI is adding new ones.

You can find economists who say that maybe the world of work won’t change too radically. AI will destroy some jobs but create others and the overall effects will be marginal. Let’s hope they are right.

But it is equally possible that by 2028 tens of millions will have either lost their jobs, or fear that they may be about to lose their jobs, or have been denied the opportunity of ever having a job in the first place. Imagine, that among them are vast numbers of educated, highly articulate members of a radicalised bourgeoisie – the class that has led revolutions since 1789. I cannot see how compromised politicians like Vance and Newsom will survive their wrath.

What is happening now in London explains why,

According to the latest Office for National Statistics figures, 22.5% of Londoners aged 16 to 24 cannot find work. London is now the UK region with the second highest rate of youth unemployment, just behind the deprived North East with its “rustbelt” industries at 24.6%. To give you a benchmark, the UK average is 16.1%, the highest it has been for 10 years but still way below London’s level.

For the first time in modern history, London is suffering rather than benefitting from technological change.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, warned in May that half of “administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30” could vanish within five years. Big graduate employers such as BT, PwC and Microsoft are cutting jobs, while half of UK companies want to redirect money from staff to AI, according to a BCG survey published in January.

The London industries that ambitious graduates favoured are particularly hard hit. Graduate-level vacancies are down by 75 per cent in banking and finance, 65 per cent in software development and 54 per cent in accounting in 2025 year compared with the same month in 2019, the Financial Times reported.

Ominously, it added that “listings have also fallen sharply in fields identified as being under less acute pressure from generative AI, such as human resources, which was down 77 per cent, and civil engineering, where there had been a 55 per cent drop in openings.”

I left university at the height of the economic crisis of the 1980s. I have never forgotten my time on the dole – youth unemployment changes your life. But the experience is more overwhelming today.

The BBC interviewed Theo dal Pozzo. He is 23, and has a first-class master’s degree in computer science. No good has it done him. He has applied for over 500 jobs and been rejected from all of them.

“There’s so many people applying to so many jobs using AI and the job listings are being scanned by AI - CVs, everything. It feels very difficult to differentiate myself from other people.”

To summarise, AI allows a job hunter to fire off applications. Employers use AI to scan them, so you have to find ways to stand out. In the meantime, AI is filling the roles that used to be taken by graduates like Theo.

On the one hand, unemployment isolates you, as it has always done. On the other, AI, throws you into the psychologically bewildering sensory overload of hundreds of applications and hundreds of rejections.

Before I go any further, I need to acknowledge that class always matters most. For all attention to devoted to graduates with law degrees sitting at home unable to find a starting salary, there are many more stories of working-class unemployment our middle-class media ignores.

I am old enough to remember recessions going back to Margaret Thatcher and it is always been the young working class in the old industrial regions of the UK, Europe and America – the north-east of England as we saw above, the Ruhr valley and Mid-West – who suffered the most.

Centre-left politicians used to invest in education. They told working-class kids to go to university, take the opportunities, and get a good middle-class job.

And now the good middle-class jobs are going.

Clearly, we need to reorientate our society to help the young. I can imagine an activist government authorising public spending programmes that give grants for small businesses to encourage graduates to look to self-employment rather to big corporations.

But here we run into the second political problem that goes beyond the power of the tech plutocracy. Everywhere in the west public spending is skewed towards the elderly. The baby boomers are such a powerful voting bloc no politician dares confront it.

But unless we find the will to take from the old and give to the young our society faces a breakdown.