雅思阅读 057 · AI Won't Kill Your Job — It Will Kill the Path to Your First One

改编自 Fortune / Yale SOM（Sonnenfeld et al., 2026）。题型：段落信息匹配 + T/F/NG + 填空。难度：较难（Passage 3，约 800 词）。

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🎧 课文朗读音频（约 1 分钟）

正文 Passage

A. The paradox

Two inconsistent phenomena seemingly can be true at the same time: AI is seen as disrupting jobs, and, yet, on the surface, it appears as if less is happening than meets the eye.

Where you stand on AI depends on whom you talk to. Schools now feverishly compete to prepare graduates with simplistic educational remedies driven by competitive branding agendas.

On the surface, the broader labour market also looks fine. Unemployment remains near historic lows, around 4%. But look closer, and the cracks begin to appear: unemployment among recent graduates has climbed to nearly 6%, rising twice as fast as the rest of the workforce since 2022.

B. The conflicting predictions

The workforce warnings are getting louder. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman has bluntly predicted that AI will cause unemployment to rise by up to 30% in the next two to five years.

The Boston Consulting Group issued a clear-eyed report suggesting that 10%-15% of existing jobs could be eliminated as soon as 2031.

Then, of course, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has made many headlines forecasting that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and push unemployment into double digits.

Others see something very different: a productivity boom, not a wave of layoffs. A recent Goldman Sachs analysis, for instance, estimates AI is already reducing U.S. employment by roughly 16,000 jobs per month.

C. The real shift: from tasks to workflows

The problem is not that the AI jobs debate is exaggerated. It is being framed incorrectly.

We keep asking whether AI will trigger mass layoffs, as if disruption must show up all at once. But that is not how this transition unfolds.

Early generative AI tools accelerated discrete tasks — drafting text, summarising documents, writing code, or answering customer questions. Agentic AI will go even further.

Unlike chatbots that respond to prompts, agents can take on broader objectives. They break work into sub-tasks, invoke tools, move across systems, and revise their approach with limited human input. The shift is no longer just from human work to machine assistance — it is from task automation to workflow automation.

D. Real-world examples

Major banks are deploying agentic systems across retail workflows and credit underwriting, delivering productivity gains of 20% to 60% and reducing turnaround times by roughly 30%.

Telecommunications operators are implementing agents for customer service and network remediation, with some deployments reporting a more than 60% reduction in manual network operations.

Manufacturers are using multi-agent systems to reduce R&D cycle times by approximately 50% and increase order intake by 40% in early deployments.

Logistics giant C.H. Robinson is handling approximately 29% more Less-Than-Truckload volume while employing 30% fewer employees than in early 2019, and roughly half of carrier bookings are now generated by agents.

E. Entry-level jobs are the real casualty

The labour impact is not that these functions disappear overnight. It is that more of the work is shifting from execution to supervision, requiring less time to complete a task.

Across sectors, the pattern is consistent: routine customer service, heavy document analysis, scheduling, quoting — these are the first to go. And the people who used to do them were almost always entry-level workers.

Morgan Stanley estimates that 37% of industry roles, or about 2.2 million U.S. jobs, face agentic-displacement risk.

One firm in the study had already reduced on-property labour hours by 30% and another had lowered headcount by 15% with entry-level positions — data labelers, junior brokers, leasing associates — among the most exposed.

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题目 Questions

Questions 1-5: Which paragraph mentions the following?

1. unemployment among recent graduates climbing to nearly 6%

2. the Boston Consulting Group report

3. agentic AI breaking work into sub-tasks

4. C.H. Robinson handling more volume with fewer employees

5. entry-level positions being most exposed

Questions 6-9: T/F/NG

6. Overall unemployment is near historic lows.

7. Goldman Sachs estimates AI is reducing U.S. employment by 16,000 jobs per year.

8. Agentic AI only responds to prompts.

9. Morgan Stanley estimates 37% of real estate industry roles face displacement risk.

Questions 10-13: Complete the notes. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.

• Verizon CEO predicted unemployment could rise by up to (10) ____________%.
• Anthropic CEO is (11) ____________.
• The shift is from task automation to (12) ____________ automation.
• Logistics giant (13) ____________ is handling 29% more LTL volume.

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答案 Answers

题号	答案
1	A
2	B
3	C
4	D
5	E
6	TRUE
7	FALSE (per month)
8	FALSE (can take broader objectives)
9	TRUE
10	30
11	Dario Amodei
12	workflow
13	C.H. Robinson

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核心词汇

AI / agentic AI / employment / entry-level jobs / automation / workflow / Yale / Goldman Sachs / Morgan Stanley / displacement