Ford’s Jim Farley says Gen Z needs its own ‘Smokey Bear’ moment for the forest fire of AI paranoia, the jobs apocalypse and the skilled trades

Mark Truby has three Gen Z sons, and he has watched them size up their futures with one eye on artificial intelligence.

“They get a little bit paranoid that AI might replace the job they might go to school for,” said Truby, Ford Motor Company’s chief communications officer, describing his three Gen Z sons, aged 19 to 24. Calling himself a child of the ’80s, Truby cited the classic ads “your brain on drugs,” “Smokey the Bear” and “got milk” as campaigns he grew up on, and explained to Fortune that Ford wants the Ad Council to do for the trades what it did for forest fires.

Truby’s sons are entering a job market where the entry-level rung looks shakier. The New York Fed put unemployment among recent college graduates at 5.7% in June, against 4.1% for all workers. Stanford economists reported in August that employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations is about 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed jobs, up from 15% a year earlier. They found the adjustment comes mainly through reduced hiring of young workers rather than layoffs.

Whether AI is the cause is contested. The Stanford authors say their findings are descriptive patterns, not causal estimates, and the gaps shrink when education is accounted for. Harvard economist David Deming is a major voice pointing to remote work, and Apollo’s Torsten Slok notes that the graduate unemployment gap began widening about six months before ChatGPT’s release. A Ramp and Revelio Labs study found entry-level headcount at heavy AI spenders grew 12% over two years. Meanwhile, what Ford CEO Jim Farley calls the “essential economy,” the mechanics, electricians, plumbers, technicians, welders and other workers who keep the physical world running — is facing a shortage that Ford argues could become more acute in the age of AI.

At Ford Pro Accelerate in Detroit on Wednesday, comedian and Ford spokesperson Nate Bargatze offered a joke about his own lack of a degree. “It wasn’t for me,” he said of college. “Those SATs and all that, that stressed me out.” Jillian Marquez, Senior Fabricator at Roush Automotive, spoke onstage with Bargatze. She said college wasn’t for her, either — she left college after a little under two months. Not only young women can go into the trades, but “even younger men and skinny men,” she said. “You can still do it. What I want to say is it’s........

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