Generation Beta (2025-2039) is being born into a world already mid-transformation, in which artificial intelligence is anchored not as a tool but as the connective tissue of education, work, and the economy. This analysis synthesizes research from the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, the McKinsey Global Institute, the University of Oxford, and other institutions, and tests it against the concrete corporate events of early and mid 2026. The finding is consistent: between 40 and 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies face meaningful disruption from AI, and the social safety structures required to manage that transition do not exist at the necessary scale in any country on earth. The mass layoffs at Oracle, Amazon, Meta, Cloudflare, and DeepL in 2026 are not the result of failing businesses. They are the result of businesses succeeding with fewer people. The transition is not hypothetical. It is happening, now, at a speed no previous technological upheaval has matched, and one that neither educational systems nor social systems were built to manage.
George A. Rauscher (Tue,) studied this question.