As it turns out, South Africa's call centres are not a bastion for John Connor's resistance against AI. Instead, Judgement Day is coming for our graduates and young professionals.

In the first three months of 2025 the graduate unemployment rate in South Africa increased by three percentage points over the final quarter of 2024. This means that, according to the latest statistics, 11.7% of university graduates are unemployed - just shy of the 11.8% peak in the same period in 2023 that Hannah MacGinty noted in a master's degree submission at Stellenbosch University.

The entry-level job market is currently the front line of a war between humans and machines. Young people are pouring out of tertiary institutions, waving their degrees proudly, and AI is the Maxim gun.

It's so bad that Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, told Steven Bartlett that mass job displacement is "more probable than not," advising young people to consider trades like plumbing on a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. Reports suggest that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. Call centres remain on those high-risk lists, but are staging...