US employers cut more than a million jobs this year, a sharp rise compared to 2024.

US employers cut more than a million jobs this year, a sharp rise compared to 2024.
Is the weak job market here to stay?

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/washington-man-spent-31-years-163000964.html

October’s job cuts are what’s really spooking economists.

"Research from the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports 153,074 job cuts across U.S. industries this October, the worst report in over a decade. For context, that’s 175% higher than October of last year and 183% above last month."

 

Technology has always replaced jobs.

However, in the past these changes were generational. And even if they happened in one's worklife, there were usually other jobs that still employed similar skill sets. The milkman becomes a delivery driver. The gas station attendant becomes a mailman. Sometimes there was some re-skilling involved.

But now technologies are advancing so rapidly that people are getting wiped out in their current fields, only to find there's nothing else for them. This is going to continue increasing geometrically.

We might, very soon, not have enough for people to do. It could be that no amount of re-skilling will do it because there's simply not enough work. What then?

We might have to reconsider (a) wealth distribution and (b) how one earns "one's way" in society.

Advances in technology were supposed to bring about greater leisure. Instead, they created the K-curve economy, where most of the gains went into the pockets of the owner class. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater. That has to be addressed.

UBI, anyone?

 

UBI is too radical for some, there are centrist solutions:

Negative income tax (Milton Friedman’s idea)
Wage subsidies)
Productivity-sharing (workers get % of automation gains)

Tax incentives for companies that retrain instead of lay off.
Shorter workweeks (triggered by productivity increases)
Investment in rapid reskilling programs focused on industries that are growing, not generic community-college fluff.

Companies should adopt human + AI hybrid roles, not mass replacement.
Workers who learn to use AI become more valuable, not obsolete.

That’s a more practical path than jumping straight to UBI. The goal shouldn’t be to replace work but to realign workers with industries where demand is actually growing.

 

ChatGPT alone does have serious limitations as a virtual assistant—it can produce errors, hallucinate facts, lack emotional intelligence, and struggle with real-time multi-tasking.

So yes, imagining it as a human assistant can be frustrating and lead to disappointment.
But the real power comes when we move to an agentic AI model that uses many specialized AI agents working together under orchestration.
Instead of one solo assistant, imagine hundreds of focused AI agents coordinating to write code, run tests, review work, and automate DevOps tasks.

This "agent swarm" model overcomes many individual model flaws by breaking down complex projects into small tasks, automating repetitive work, and routing specialized jobs to the right AI.
While no AI—including agentic systems—is perfect or independent of human oversight, this approach is proving to speed up software development massively and reduce routine errors.
It's a big step beyond single-model assistants like ChatGPT alone and more like having a whole intelligent dev team working in parallel.

So while ChatGPT as a lone assistant has clear weaknesses, agentic AI composed of many collaborating agents offers a powerful paradigm shift for automation and productivity.

Human judgment and guidance remain critical, but these multi-agent systems represent a new frontier in how AI can actually deliver on those high expectations.

And its a tip of an iceberg.
My team is using Clode to orchestrate and route jobs, leveraging one of the leading platforms enabling the kind of "agent swarm" that can massively accelerate coding, testing, and deployment by distributing work intelligently across.

The down side is thousands jobs lost.
I have friends that got downsided.
My team was recently spered the , at least for the near future, but there ate no guarantees.

 

Typo I meant - Claude Code, Agentic AI Claude. Not Clod..

 

So. Much. Winning.

 

I think one main reason to increase in layoffs is due to Artificial intelligence and automation.
The reality is that both policy choices and broader trends like high interest rates, government cuts, and AI-driven restructuring are showing up in the data.
The administration has pursued an aggressive downsizing of the federal civilian workforce, with officials projecting hundreds of thousands of federal positions leaving by the end of 2025 through buyouts and reductions in force.
The administration indicated earlier in 2025 that we can expect a painful adjustment period that WH argues will produce a leaner federal government and a stronger economy later.

Time will show

 

Time shows that the economy is consistently awful under Republicans, including Trump's first term. Republicans just lie.

 

This is a general problem made way worse in the Trump era. I think it crept up on us as Fox was born. As we started having different silos for getting the news. For some reason the Republican news sources are just less reliable.