92 million jobs erased by AI: Is UCU preparing students for an AI world?

I remember opening the news one day and seeing an article that caught my eye:

“92 Million Jobs Gone: Who Will AI Erase First?”

This was the title of a Forbes article that analyzed the World Economic Forum’s Future Job Report 2025, which predicted that AI would erase 92 million jobs by 2030. The report surveyed more than 1,000 of the largest employers worldwide, representing 22 industry clusters and over 14

million workers. The report claimed that professions already being taken over by Artificial Intelligence include data analysis, finance, customer service, and writing, with economists and scholars scrambling to predict which industries will be affected next. The report emphasizes the importance of farmers, construction workers, and medical workers as the largest growing professions.

That article was stuck in my head all day. As I sat down in one of my classes, I began to ask myself, “Will UCU survive the AI revolution?” and as I looked around, my fellow classmates, I further asked myself, “Are we being prepared to get a job in this AI world?”

UCU’s multidisciplinary style of teaching is what attracts most students to enroll. Courses teach students to learn methodologies, how to research, and really how to understand the world around us. Humanities courses in Linguistics, Art History, and Philosophy not only help you understand difficult

concepts but also help you to be creative in the ways you analyze them. Whenever the end of courses hits, I am always struck by the UCU humanities’ students’ originality in their final essays, from a new modern critique on Locke’s philosophies to a new area of decolonizing Art, humanities courses develop the creativity necessary for an AI world where human originality becomes scarce.

In the social sciences, from Politics to Economics to Law, students learn to unpack difficult problems, whether analyzing international human rights cases to analyzing countries’ economic practices. Students learn how to apply theories to real-world scenarios and think deeply about the issues of our

time. Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology courses all help understand the process of research and data analysis and give a spotlight to mental issues, societal structures, and minority communities, which often are not researched enough. UCU’s course design also pushes students to collaborate, whether through joint final papers at the end of the semester or those nerve-wracking class presentations that demand a full 20 minutes of discussion, developing those key skills. In the sciences, the same is true whether it's Biology, Chemistry, or Physics students are working in groups learning methodologies and research, while simultaneously working on their critical thinking, creativity, and communication.

The UCU courses help students learn inherent ‘human skills’: how to develop their own critical voice, creativity, and effective communication. But there is one very apparent overarching area where UCU still falls short. While UCU helps students differentiate themselves from AI, it is not helping students use it. 

Generative AI is currently used in almost every major industry and academic field at every level. Politicians are using AI to analyze voter data and populations' responses to policies. An article published by the Harvard Kennedy School claimed that AI is being used to automate routine

administrative tasks, data analysis, and social media monitoring in political offices and campaigns, reducing demand for some support staff and communications roles. In the legal field, paralegal work, contract drafting, and legal research are being replaced by AI models already analyzing documents with 90% accuracy. 

Accomplished anthropologist Matt Artz, in an article for Anthropology News, emphasized how in sociological and anthropological academia, routine data processing and analysis tasks are shifting to AI, while human experts focus on complex, ethical, creative, and culturally nuanced work, just like in political science. That means that if you are a sociologist or anthropologist, you will be using AI every step of the way, from finding articles with Perplexity.ai, for example, to using Chat GPT to analyze numbers, to getting Grammarly to help write your article. 

According to MIT News, chemists are using AI for experimental planning, reaction predictions, enhancing drug synthesis, and atmospheric chemistry. Biologists are using AI to simulate massive datasets of DNA sequences, which may speed up biological research and enable advancements in synthetic biology. In physics, generative AI models inspired by physical laws generate realistic synthetic data and simulate complex physical systems. The list of AI applications for STEM is endless. 

If AI is already transforming the work of politicians, lawyers, anthropologists, and STEM researchers, then universities like UCU, which claim to be interdisciplinary institutions, cannot afford to treat it as an optional skill; they must prepare students to live and work in this new reality. 

So, are UCUers being prepared to get a job in this AI world? As most answers in UCU courses go, it’s a yes and a no. Learning how to be creative, having a deep understanding of concepts, strong communication skills, and understanding of research processes are all attributes that have value, and that, through UCU, students work on with every course, lecture, teacher, and assignment. Yet while UCU prepares students to be set apart from AI, it does not help them work with it. If the World Economic Forum and the International Labour Organization are correct, and AI will touch every industry and every part of research, then excluding it from our syllabi does nothing to prepare students for that future. As UCU students, we need to think not only about how AI might affect job markets in the next five years, but also how we will still have a place in them in ten, twenty, and forty years from now, as AI keeps developing and transforming jobs. The future will not be humans versus AI, but humans who can work with AI versus those who cannot; that is the future that UCU needs to prepare its students for.