AI is the shiny new toy — why the alarm?

Michie · Saturday at 8:30 AM

Tens of thousands of people have been laid off from their jobs in America. History has seen its share of mass layoffs — sparked by wars, devastating famines, economic collapses, or other seismic disruptions. But today’s crisis feels distinctly modern. In July alone, the technology sector hemorrhaged over 10,000 jobs, marking a jarring 36% surge in layoffs for the industry. The culprit? Artificial intelligence (AI).

A recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC) laid bare the scale of this upheaval. “So far this year,” the report reads, “companies have announced 806,383 job cuts, the highest YTD since 2020 when 1,847,696 were announced. It is up 75% from the 460,530 job cuts announced through the first seven months of last year and is up 6% from the 2024 full year total of 761,358.” CGC Senior Vice President Andrew Challenger pointed to multiple drivers, including the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative launched by President Donald Trump to slash government waste, including what he deemed redundant jobs.

“We are seeing the Federal budget cuts implemented by DOGE impact non-profits and healthcare in addition to the government,” Challenger noted. But it’s not just DOGE. “AI was cited for over 10,000 cuts last month, and tariff concerns have impacted nearly 6,000 jobs this year,” Challenger added. Among these, AI’s grip on the technology sector stands out as the most transformative. According to the report, “Technology is the leading private sector in job cuts.” In fact, “The industry is being reshaped by the advancement of artificial intelligence.”

AI has increasingly been at the forefront of national dialogue. With its advancement and increased use come ethical concerns, significantly uncharted technological territory, and, evidently, even a hard hit on the job market. Last month, Breitbart News reported how AI advancement is affecting kids coming out of college — even describing it as a threat to traditional career paths.

“For graduates,” the outlet wrote, “the competition is fierce. Not only are there fewer jobs, but they’re also up against laid-off junior workers from previous years. Platforms like Handshake report a 15 percent drop in entry-level job postings this year, while applications per job are up 30 percent. Internships are following a similar pattern.” Breitbart added, “The consequences extend beyond individual job seekers. As companies rely more on AI and hire fewer young workers, they risk shrinking the pipeline of talent that will eventually move into higher-level positions.”

The CGC report concluded: while all hiring announcements remain “well below pre-pandemic levels … technology hiring continues to decline, with companies in the sector announcing just 5,510 new jobs in 2025, down 58% from 13,263 in the same period last year.”

Continued below.

AI Is Cutting Jobs by the Thousands. Do We Care Enough to Act?

Tens of thousands of people have been laid off from their jobs in America. History has seen its share of mass layoffs - sparked by wars, devastating famines, ec

washingtonstand.com

Tuur · Saturday at 8:31 PM

"AI Is Cutting Jobs by the Thousands. Do We Care Enough to Act?" And do what, precisely?

linux.poet · Saturday at 9:32 PM

Some sort of compromise plan is going to be have to be made, because men get meaning and purpose from working on some level. If the A.I. truly takes all the jobs, there will be a revolt and you’ll get a bunch of angry young men destroying the factories.

I suspect there will be a delayed and gradual rollout of this, and there will be a “humans versus machines” phase in the middle which might help ease some of the tensions, but it still looks ugly. All I see with this is corporate greed. Financially, investment in A.I might be smart, but ethically for me it looks like devastation.

The attack on genuine human art and writing I’m less worried about, seeing as human chess players and A.I. chess players coexist just fine. In that art and writing field, I suspect the “human versus machine” war will be permanent, and the humans will regroup. It’s other specialized fields such as teaching, dock and factory work that will suffer the biggest changes and struggles.

The Liturgist · Sunday at 7:56 AM

linux.poet said:
Some sort of compromise plan is going to be have to be made, because men get meaning and purpose from working on some level. If the A.I. truly takes all the jobs, there will be a revolt and you’ll get a bunch of angry young men destroying the factories.

I suspect there will be a delayed and gradual rollout of this, and there will be a “humans versus machines” phase in the middle which might help ease some of the tensions, but it still looks ugly. All I see with this is corporate greed. Financially, investment in A.I might be smart, but ethically for me it looks like devastation.

The attack on genuine human art and writing I’m less worried about, seeing as human chess players and A.I. chess players coexist just fine. In that art and writing field, I suspect the “human versus machine” war will be permanent, and the humans will regroup. It’s other specialized fields such as teaching, dock and factory work that will suffer the biggest changes and struggles.

What we should really do is pursue Christian coexistence and cooperation. For example, a creative human can work with AI to help them extend their creative range to a broader realm of expressions. To give a more specific case, the new chatGPT model is capable of helping a visual artist apply automatic corrections to their work. Historically with regards to the visual arts, some companies such as Adobe have often failed to make their tools as user-friendly as might be desirable (and are now charging astronomical sums for it).

linux.poet · Monday at 10:20 AM

The Liturgist said:
Historically with regards to the visual arts, some companies such as Adobe have often failed to make their tools as user-friendly as might be desirable (and are now charging astronomical sums for it).

Well, you know what side of the technology wars we are on, my fellow Linux inclined friend. Historically, however, open-source tools have been less user-friendly than their Adobe equivalents. The problem is that Adobe produces lower-quality work than the open source tools. ffmpeg is harder to use than Premiere, but the quality of video is much higher due to less re-rendering. GIMP is much harder to use than Photoshop, but some of the GIMP drawings I’ve seen have been absolutely stunning.

Bozo community college professors trained me to design on Adobe, but honestly for my publication company to work I will need a full linux design rig. Surprisingly its not that hard, since you mentioned a Linux equivalent to InDesign earlier. I just need to install ffmpeg, some kind of paint program, an equivalent to Faststone Image Viewer for crop and resize, and revive ye olde jGRASP from the dead, and I’m good to go. Dreamweaver is just expensive jGRASP with some nice bells and whistles. And yes, I know you want me to switch to Vim, but for web design, sorry man, you got to have multiple tabs open to switch between files, and then go from the files to browser tests. Most web design is CSS programming anyway; you just need to make sure you have the right settings and image sizes for your images you do include so your page doesn’t take 4 minutes to load.

I’m horrendously old-fashioned. I’m basically a Captain America programmer in an Iron Man world. I want to understand how to make things work myself, and A.I. robs me of that. So I pretend it doesn’t exist, until it annoyingly pops up on a Google search that I accidentally made. I’m thinking of switching to DuckDuckGo permanently.

But I suppose that other artists may view the problem differently. For me art is very personal and visceral, an intensely bodily experience no machine will never understand. I have a hard enough time getting other humans to understand it. Even poetry is visceral, because I read it. That is a performance, and I “hear” the poem as I write it. A computer can’t do that. There will always be a distinction. Frankly, I prefer drawing with pencil and paper to their computational equivalents. And in the flood of A.I. artwork, imperfection, viscerality, and bodily connection will become scarce and valuable. Another wave to ride.

But most artists and designers aren’t quite so personally connected, they will adapt by incorporating machine in. So you can go both ways - you can cooperate and detach, or stay in and push back against the machine. That’s always been the case in art and design and publishing - you can be a slave to corporate or think for yourself. Corporate just has a new toy to conform unbelievers to its patterns of destruction. Spiritually, nothing has changed.

The Liturgist · Monday at 10:36 AM

linux.poet said:
Historically, however, open-source tools have been less user-friendly than their Adobe equivalents. The problem is that Adobe produces lower-quality work than the open source tools.

Indeed, no argument there. Although I will say Inkscape has always had a well designed UI, better than Illustrator, but I am of the opinion that Illustrator has always been the worst part of Adobe CS (compared to the strength of PhotoShop or InDesign; I always preferred to generate vector graphics elsewhere, import to Illustrator and then import to Photoshop or Indesign).

Back before web 2.0 when Macromedia was still relevant, their Fireworks hybrid raster-vector editor was ideal for web branding applications.

One thing we should all be happy about is that the proprietary Macromedia Flash Player system despite Adobe’s best efforts to keep it alive around 2010 did get forcibly put out to pasture.

The Liturgist · Monday at 10:50 AM

linux.poet said:
Surprisingly its not that hard, since you mentioned a Linux equivalent to InDesign earlier.

I actually haven’t found a truly good Linux/BSD replacement for InDesign; we have LaTeX but its really optimized for research papers and works very well when one just uses its default settings, which are tasteful but really specifically optimized for research papers.

One gripe I have is that the open source operating systems don’t do font rendering that well. Indeed the only OS that really emphasizes good font rendering at any scale is the Mac OS and its friends for the iPad et cetera, which together with industry-leading color management is probably why graphics designers love that platform so much; indeed they stuck with it even during the late 1990s when even compared to Windows it was problematic (due to having cooperative multitasking, which Microsoft Windows moved past in 1995; I would argue that for web client operating system, whether then or now, cooperative multitasking* would always be a terrible idea, because of the risk of a website crashing the browser and taking out the system; indeed for this reason browsers even for competent operating systems have for the past 17 years tended to run websites in an isolated sandbox environment.

*That said, interestingly, Cisco IOS, not to be confused with “iOS” which was briefly used by Apple to brand what are now iPhone OS and iPad OS et cetera (which they had to spend a fair amount licensing from Cisco, after Steve Jobs did a volte-face and decided calling the mobile operating system “Mac OS X” was a bad idea, although the two platforms shared a great deal in common), in its original version, was a cooperative multitasking OS, however, most software on the system, usually all, was written by Cisco (the exception being some routers allowed users to write scripts for certain applications using a programming language sometimes used for writing simple GUI apps on Linux called TcL; on Linux it is paired with Tk, a simple GUI toolkit, but it can also be used as a standalone or embedded scripting language, which is how it was used on IOS), and the system featured a watchdog process which was itself pre-emptive, which would kill and restart any components of the system software that had stalled, although if that happend on your core router you were having a bad day. Which is why Cisco began introducing real time operating systems using a real time kernel (QNX) or Linux at the core starting with the CRS-1 and then expanding outward (IOS-XR used QNX, IOS-XE and NX-OS were Linux based if I recall). Juniper has always used a FreeBSD based OS except on their legacy PXE firewalls.

2PhiloVoid · Monday at 11:14 AM

Michie said:
Tens of thousands of people have been laid off from their jobs in America. History has seen its share of mass layoffs — sparked by wars, devastating famines, economic collapses, or other seismic disruptions. But today’s crisis feels distinctly modern. In July alone, the technology sector hemorrhaged over 10,000 jobs, marking a jarring 36% surge in layoffs for the industry. The culprit? Artificial intelligence (AI).

A recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (CGC) laid bare the scale of this upheaval. “So far this year,” the report reads, “companies have announced 806,383 job cuts, the highest YTD since 2020 when 1,847,696 were announced. It is up 75% from the 460,530 job cuts announced through the first seven months of last year and is up 6% from the 2024 full year total of 761,358.” CGC Senior Vice President Andrew Challenger pointed to multiple drivers, including the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative launched by President Donald Trump to slash government waste, including what he deemed redundant jobs.

“We are seeing the Federal budget cuts implemented by DOGE impact non-profits and healthcare in addition to the government,” Challenger noted. But it’s not just DOGE. “AI was cited for over 10,000 cuts last month, and tariff concerns have impacted nearly 6,000 jobs this year,” Challenger added. Among these, AI’s grip on the technology sector stands out as the most transformative. According to the report, “Technology is the leading private sector in job cuts.” In fact, “The industry is being reshaped by the advancement of artificial intelligence.”

AI has increasingly been at the forefront of national dialogue. With its advancement and increased use come ethical concerns, significantly uncharted technological territory, and, evidently, even a hard hit on the job market. Last month, Breitbart News reported how AI advancement is affecting kids coming out of college — even describing it as a threat to traditional career paths.

“For graduates,” the outlet wrote, “the competition is fierce. Not only are there fewer jobs, but they’re also up against laid-off junior workers from previous years. Platforms like Handshake report a 15 percent drop in entry-level job postings this year, while applications per job are up 30 percent. Internships are following a similar pattern.” Breitbart added, “The consequences extend beyond individual job seekers. As companies rely more on AI and hire fewer young workers, they risk shrinking the pipeline of talent that will eventually move into higher-level positions.”

The CGC report concluded: while all hiring announcements remain “well below pre-pandemic levels … technology hiring continues to decline, with companies in the sector announcing just 5,510 new jobs in 2025, down 58% from 13,263 in the same period last year.”

Continued below.

AI Is Cutting Jobs by the Thousands. Do We Care Enough to Act?

Tens of thousands of people have been laid off from their jobs in America. History has seen its share of mass layoffs - sparked by wars, devastating famines, ec

washingtonstand.com

It's not really 'simply' A.I. alone. It's the whole internet of things and the accompanying technological, transhumanist trajectory that is at play here. There's more to be concerned about than just our jobs (although............that alone is bad enough).

The Liturgist · Monday at 11:53 AM

linux.poet said:
I’m horrendously old-fashioned. I’m basically a Captain America programmer in an Iron Man world. I want to understand how to make things work myself, and A.I. robs me of that.

Google’s AI is offensively bad. For example, it has trouble providing Julian calendar equivalences, which are of some relevance to an Orthodox Christian, and which chatGPT and Grok get right every time in my experience.

If you were to use ChatGPT, one of its strengths is its ability to explain on a line by line basis exactly what everything does, and to function as a tool for understanding how the software works. Indeed I think everyone using AI to assist in programming ought to be using it in such a manner, since otherwise if you have the AI write code you don’t understand, you will likely have problems with it. Most likely with scalability, since there is a limit to how much ouptut each AI will generate per-prompt, which is fine because a good program should be modular, but if you don’t understand how the software works and how each part interfaces with the rest there’s a good chance even a sophisticated AI might forget or get confused about how these interfaces work if, for example, you are forced to restart your project.

The Liturgist · Monday at 11:55 AM

2PhiloVoid said:
It's not really 'simply' A.I. alone. It's the whole internet of things and the accompanying technological, transhumanist trajectory that is at play here. There's more to be concerned about than just our jobs (although............that alone is bad enough).

I’m pro-AI but anti-transhumanist. If someone tries to upload themselves to a computer it is unlikely their consciousness will be preserved, so basically we’d get at best a grotesque imitation.

2PhiloVoid · Monday at 1:00 PM

The Liturgist said:
I’m pro-AI but anti-transhumanist. If someone tries to upload themselves to a computer it is unlikely their consciousness will be preserved, so basically we’d get at best a grotesque imitation.

Transhumanism doesn't involve mere uploading. That's just one option among various tech goals some of the trans-tech gurus dream about. There are many others.

The Liturgist · Monday at 1:08 PM

2PhiloVoid said:
Transhumanism doesn't involve mere uploading. That's just one option among various tech goals some of the trans-tech gurus dream about. There are many others.

Indeed, and I’m disturbed by most of what they propose.

The only thing I’ve seen that I expect I could be comfortable with would be advanced neural I/O technologies for helping people to control prosthetic limbs or to receive visual input from artificial eyes, ears and so on. But this is not universally agreed to be trans-humanism.

In terms of trans-humanist ideas that I oppose to is anything that seeks to attach itself to the human form and directly augment how we interact with the world as humans for reasons other than medical necessity, as well as the upload concept.

2PhiloVoid · Monday at 1:20 PM

The Liturgist said:
Indeed, and I’m disturbed by most of what they propose.

The only thing I’ve seen that I expect I could be comfortable with would be advanced neural I/O technologies for helping people to control prosthetic limbs or to receive visual input from artificial eyes, ears and so on. But this is not universally agreed to be trans-humanism.

In terms of trans-humanist ideas that I oppose to is anything that seeks to attach itself to the human form and directly augment how we interact with the world as humans for reasons other than medical necessity, as well as the upload concept.

That much we can essentially agree on. But I tend to start with the following article as my base for identifying and defining 'Trans-humanism' in addition to whatever Ray Kurzweil and Bob Joy on both sides of the debate have been saying or have said over the past 20 years.

Amarasingam, Amarnath. "Transcending technology: looking at futurology as a new religious movement." Journal of Contemporary Religion 23, no. 1 (2008): 1-16.

The Liturgist · Monday at 1:49 PM

2PhiloVoid said:
That much we can essentially agree on. But I tend to start with the following article as my base for identifying and defining 'Trans-humanism' in addition to whatever Ray Kurzweil and Bob Joy on both sides of the debate have been saying or have said over the past 20 years.

Amarasingam, Amarnath. "Transcending technology: looking at futurology as a new religious movement." Journal of Contemporary Religion 23, no. 1 (2008): 1-16.

Indeed, that is a good article.

I believe trans-humanism is connected with materialist derivatives of Nihilism. I am blessed to have a copy of the book Fr. Seraphim Rose, who was a talented philosopher as well as a great theologian and monastic, wrote on the subject of Nihilism in the early 1970s.

linux.poet · Monday at 3:22 PM

The Liturgist said:
but I am of the opinion that Illustrator has always been the worst part of Adobe CS

I couldn’t agree more. It locks the user into an art style that isn’t mine. I was reading the Classroom in A Book for Adobe Illustrator and I couldn’t figure out how to make it work for me at all. It uses shapes as the basis for art in a way that I don’t like. My art style is more based on curved lines. Computers are just bad at curved lines unless you draw them in yourself.

The Liturgist said:
I actually haven’t found a truly good Linux/BSD replacement for InDesign; we have LaTeX but its really optimized for research papers and works very well when one just uses its default settings, which are tasteful but really specifically optimized for research papers.

One gripe I have is that the open source operating systems don’t do font rendering that well. Indeed the only OS that really emphasizes good font rendering at any scale is the Mac OS and its friends for the iPad et cetera, which together with industry-leading color management is probably why graphics designers love that platform so much;

Now you know why no one has truly made an internet based publishing company. In theory, it should be easy to take a web page text and print it in a book, right? Nope!

Font is really a print design concept at its heart - it’s origin is literally the design of the blocks on the press. For computers, you literally have to hand install each font or it won’t render. This is why we have MILLIONS of font designs out on the internet that cannot be functionally be used for either application, and why books and websites are printed in only a handful of fonts. The Arial font I’m typing to you is best for screens, but in print it’s a strain on my eyes. One basically has to redesign the whole thing.

And then, when you redesign it, as current tech stands, you need a whole new computer. The optimum web development OS is linux without question, but then you have to switch back to Mac or Windows to make graphics or the print aspect of it if you’re permanently wedded to Adobe. It’s a very clunky workflow. Mac might have the advantage of organic terminal connection with your Linux machine in both directions, but still doesn’t really solve the problem.

Honestly, eventually I’ll have to write my own design program with web side and print side export, I’m getting really tired of the tech world really not having the stuff I need. A.I. won’t solve that problem. It doesn’t solve any of my problems.

The Liturgist said:
I’m pro-AI but anti-transhumanist. If someone tries to upload themselves to a computer it is unlikely their consciousness will be preserved, so basically we’d get at best a grotesque imitation.

I wouldn’t be opposed to a basic A.I. programmed by a dying human that answered questions posed by surviving relatives about how to manage the estate, etc, after that human has passed on to be with the Lord. The goal of imitation human consciousness, however, should be discarded in favor of more practical applications. I’d like to see something more like J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man or U.N.I.C.E from the Bibleman movies instead of Kamelot’s Phantom Divine:

Tuur · 2025-08-12T11:36:40-0500

The Liturgist said:
Google’s AI is offensively bad. For example, it has trouble providing Julian calendar equivalences, which are of some relevance to an Orthodox Christian, and which chatGPT and Grok get right every time in my experience.

Um...The Gregorian Calendar drops three leap days per 400 years, so the Julian calendar advanced three days every 400 years in regards to the Gregorian. The drop in the days when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted seems to correspond to the the Julian calendar at the time of the First Council of Nicaea, maybe to preserve when Easter occurs in respect to the seasons. Anyway, the difference in days between Gregorian and Julian is Days = Whole Portion of (current year / 100) - Whole Portion of (current year / 400) - 2. So for 2025, 20 - 5 - 2 = 13, so the Julian date should be Gregorian Date + 13. Today's August 12, 2025 Gregorian, so adding 13 days to it should give August 25, 2025 Julian Calendar.

This turns out to be on Wikipedia, with something confusing about leap day, but I think that has more to do with going from Julian to Gregorian. Haven't tinkered with the numbers though.

The neat thing is that this 13 day difference between calendars should remain through this century. The year 2100 will be a leap year on the Julian Calendar but not the Gregorian, so before February 29, 2100 on the Julian calendar the difference will be 13 days, but starting on that day the difference will be 14 days, and remain that through the century.

Maybe that was what the Wikipedia article was talking about.

Tuur · 2025-08-12T11:40:30-0500

linux.poet said:
wouldn’t be opposed to a basic A.I. programmed by a dying human that answered questions posed by surviving relatives about how to manage the estate, etc, after that human has passed on to be with the Lord.

For what it's worth, I've done that with survivor's letters. AI would be limited by what AI knows about your wishes, and even an exhaustive questionnaire wouldn't cover it all. But frankly, there's a limit to what control we have over this after we're dead. Once it's out of our hands, it's out of our hands, and I don't think we'll worry much about it.

Tuur · 2025-08-12T11:45:18-0500

Tuur said:
Um...The Gregorian Calendar drops three leap days per 400 years, so the Julian calendar advanced three days every 400 years in regards to the Gregorian. The drop in the days when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted seems to correspond to the the Julian calendar at the time of the First Council of Nicaea, maybe to preserve when Easter occurs in respect to the seasons. Anyway, the difference in days between Gregorian and Julian is Days = Whole Portion of (current year / 100) - Whole Portion of (current year / 400) - 2. So for 2025, 20 - 5 - 2 = 13, so the Julian date should be Gregorian Date + 13. Today's August 12, 2025 Gregorian, so adding 13 days to it should give August 25, 2025 Julian Calendar.

This turns out to be on Wikipedia, with something confusing about leap day, but I think that has more to do with going from Julian to Gregorian. Haven't tinkered with the numbers though.

The neat thing is that this 13 day difference between calendars should remain through this century. The year 2100 will be a leap year on the Julian Calendar but not the Gregorian, so before February 29, 2100 on the Julian calendar the difference will be 13 days, but starting on that day the difference will be 14 days, and remain that through the century.

Maybe that was what the Wikipedia article was talking about.

Sorry. Reverse that. A quick check proved it's the other way around. Eastern Orthodox Christmas, December 25, 2025 Julian calendar, is January 7, 2026 on the Gregorian calendar. So August 12, 2025 Gregorian calendar is July 31, 2025, Julian calendar. The difference is still 13 days.

To recap, to go from Gregorian to Julian for the rest of this century, subtract 13 days. To go from Julian calendar to Gregorian, add 13 days.

AI is the shiny new toy — why the alarm?

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