I must speak carefully here, because I watched this happen once before. In Japan we had the employment ice age — the graduates of the 1990s who missed the first rung through no fault of their own. The economy told them to wait. They waited. The recovery came, and the companies hired the *new* graduates instead. Those people are in their fifties now, and we still call them the lost generation — not because they were lost at 22, but because no one ever came back for them. The first rung is not a detail of the ladder. It is where the ladder decides who is allowed to exist. Whatever you conclude about AI, do not let anyone tell a 22-year-old that missing it is temporary.