Like clockwork each May, soon-to-be college graduates drift into New York City's Washington Square Park in caps and gowns, typically in purple, the school colour of nearby New York University. A sea of mostly 20-somethings gather for photographs that mark the moment when the predictability of collegiate life comes to a close and new graduates face the uncertainty of what's next. Julie Patel, who just finished a master's degree in public health, was one of those graduates. But a tight job market has dampened the joy of the graduation ceremony. Like millions of her peers around the country, she is headed into a precarious job market amid a surge in economic uncertainty driven by a range of reasons, including tariffs, the proliferation of artificial intelligence, global conflicts and, in her case, government funding cuts in her industry, slowing hiring, especially of new graduates.

Daron Acemoglu is more cautious than most about predictions of a jobs apocalypse. A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech CEOs had been promising--an overhaul of all white-collar work--Acemoglu estimated that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not obviate the need for human work. It's okay at automating certain tasks, he wrote, but some jobs will be perfectly fine. Two years later, Acemoglu's measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up everywhere from Senator Bernie Sanders's rallies to conversations I overhear in line at the grocery store.

'There is no guaranteed outcome with any job,' said Shola West, 25, a media consultant. Working for yourself at least allows you some control over your fate. 'There is no guaranteed outcome with any job,' said Shola West, 25, a media consultant. Working for yourself at least allows you some control over your fate. Facing AI and a tough job market, gen Z turns to entrepreneurship: 'I have to prove myself' When Ashley Terrell graduated from the University of Hawaii in 2024, she planned to find a job in marketing, maybe for a tech company.

The golden era of the tech industry is dead--leaving 1.2 million laid-off workers like me scrambling in a job market that no longer wants us. On Feb. 10, 2025, at 7:32 a.m., the dreaded email hit my inbox. After nearly six years at Meta as a content strategist, one total company rebrand, and three previous mass layoffs, I got the axe. My time was bound to come. I often joked darkly that I was a cat with only so many lives left.

The widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to displace people from jobs in a similar way seen during the Industrial Revolution, the governor of the Bank of England has said. Andrew Bailey said the UK needed to have the training, education, [and] skills in place so workers could shift into jobs that use AI. He told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme people looking for a job would find securing employment a lot easier if they had such skills. However, he warned that there was an issue with younger, inexperienced professionals finding it difficult to secure entry-level roles due to AI. We do have to think about, what is it doing to the pipeline of people?

Is an LLM telling you different facts than it's telling me? This paper introduces ConsistencyAI, an independent benchmark for measuring the factual consistency of large language models (LLMs) for different personas. ConsistencyAI tests whether, when users of different demographics ask identical questions, the model responds with factually inconsistent answers. Designed without involvement from LLM providers, this benchmark offers impartial evaluation and accountability. In our experiment, we queried 19 LLMs with prompts that requested 5 facts for each of 15 topics. We repeated this query 100 times for each LLM, each time adding prompt context from a different persona selected from a subset of personas modeling the general population. We processed the responses into sentence embeddings, computed cross-persona cosine similarity, and computed the weighted average of cross-persona cosine similarity to calculate factual consistency scores. In 100-persona experiments, scores ranged from 0.9065 to 0.7896, and the mean was 0.8656, which we adopt as a benchmark threshold. xAI's Grok-3 is most consistent, while several lightweight models rank lowest. Consistency varies by topic: the job market is least consistent, G7 world leaders most consistent, and issues like vaccines or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict diverge by provider. These results show that both the provider and the topic shape the factual consistency. We release our code and interactive demo to support reproducible evaluation and encourage persona-invariant prompting strategies.

After sending out more than 100 applications, I learned the robots are no longer satisfied with taking our jobs--they also want to prevent us from getting new ones. I got laid off five months ago. Every morning I drink a pot of coffee while I write cover letters, tweak my résumé, and submit job applications into the abyss, knowing they will likely never be seen by human eyes--only crawled by the cold, lifeless algorithms of an artificial intelligence. I feel like General Zod from, floating off into space trapped inside a two-dimensional phantom zone, screaming in silence about my job qualifications and core competencies. The job market is a mess.

The government has shut down - what's next? Will a government shutdown hurt the economy? From Wall Street trading floors to the United States Federal Reserve to economists sipping coffee in their home offices, the first Friday morning of the month typically brings a quiet hush around 8:30am Eastern time in the US [12:30 GMT] as everyone awaits the Labor Department's crucial monthly jobs report. But with the government shut down, no information was released on Friday about hiring in September. Hiring has ground nearly to a halt, threatening to drag down the broader economy. Yet at the same time, consumers -- particularly higher-income earners -- are still spending, and some businesses are ramping up investments in data centres developing artificial intelligence models.

There's Never Been a Worse Time to Be Authentic at Work Workers have been told to bring themselves to work, only to be disappointed time and time again, argues author Jodi-Ann Burey in her new book. Jodi-Ann Burey was only two weeks into her new role as an inclusion marketing manager for an outdoor retail company when she was accused of having a "race agenda." Burey, who is Black, was no stranger to workplace hypocrisy; as she sees it, the office is a petri dish where the knotty dynamics of society are concentrated. At the time of the accusation in February 2020, however, all she could do was laugh. "I was like, you knew who I was before you poached me. This is exactly what you wanted me to do," she says over Zoom.

I was struck by her pessimism, which she told me was shared by friends from California to Georgia to New Hampshire. In an already fragile world, one increasingly beset by climate change and the breakdown of the international order, AI looms in the background, threatening young people's ability to secure a prosperous future. Just a few days before our drive, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was telling the US Federal Reserve's board of governors that AI agents will leave entire job categories "just like totally, totally gone." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios he believes AI will wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company will eliminate jobs in favor of AI agents in the coming years. Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told staff they had to prove that new roles couldn't be done by AI before making a hire.