The work that disappeared in Kenya after ChatGPT arrived was the outsourced business of writing assignments for overseas students. Many of the people who took on this work are university graduates. As students who had been outsourcing their assignments began using AI themselves, the orders dwindled.
Over the same period, U.S. manufacturing jobs fell by 75,000 since January of last year. The two figures cover different populations, regions and periods, so they cannot be added together or set against each other. The occupations long singled out as the ones AI would erase were the upper tier of white-collar work such as law and accounting, while the work that actually dried up was knowledge outsourcing in developing countries and factory lines in the United States.
The National Assembly Library, citing an International Labour Organization (ILO) report, said that a 10% drop in youth jobs in the AI high-risk category would affect 5.6 million people. The high-risk category refers to jobs classified as having a substantial share of their tasks replaceable by current AI. The National Assembly Library's release did not specify what scope this figure of 5.6 million covers.
Kenya's ghostwriting business was work close to the entry point of a career. When local employment was blocked even after graduating from university, it was a channel for earning foreign currency on the strength of English document-writing skills alone. When that channel narrows, the foothold for moving up to the next stage disappears with it. Youth employment is fragile because the likelihood of replacement is high and because there is no career to hold on to in the first place.
Some argue that even if manufacturing returns to the United States, employment will not rise by as much. That is because the returning factories are designed around robots and automated equipment. Reports also noted a reversal in which physical delivery jobs such as parcel work have moved up the lists of promising occupations in the AI era.
These matters were reported one after another between the 6th and the 8th. AI's employment shock does not move from the top down starting with higher incomes, but sweeps first through places with weak bargaining power, such as subcontracting beyond the border and the factory floor.
There are no statistics tracking what work Nairobi's university graduates moved into after the ghostwriting orders stopped. The number of jobs lost is counted, but where the people who lost that work went is not tallied.
