Now that our Labor Day festivities have passed, it's time for each of us to ask ourselves difficult questions and prepare for what may be a challenging road ahead. Our country’s observance of Labor Day is actually the child of conflict, forged in strikes and marches for dignity at work. But the clash between labor and technology is older still – reaching back to the English textile mills of the early 1800s. It was there that workers faced their own collision with technology – leaving us a cautionary tale that holds critical lessons for the 21st century.
The Luddites: A Lesson from 1811
In 1811, in the Nottinghamshire region of England, a band of textile workers took a drastic stand against what they saw as their economic undoing. The new mechanized looms — faster, cheaper, and operated by less-skilled labor — threatened not just their wages but their very way of life. These men, who came to be called Luddites, rallied under the name of “Ned Ludd,” a figure who may never have existed but whose name became a banner for their cause.
The Luddites didn’t write petitions or stage polite protests. They smashed the machines. “Frame-breaking,” as it was called, spread across the English Midlands over the next five years. To them, destroying the looms seemed the only way to preserve their livelihoods.
The government’s response was swift and brutal. In 1812, Parliament passed the Frame Breaking Act, making machine-breaking a capital offense. Troops were deployed in numbers rivaling those sent to fight Napoleon. Dozens of Luddites were hanged; many more were imprisoned or exiled to Australia. In the end, the looms remained, the factories expanded, and industrialization marched on.
Their fears were real: Wages had collapsed, child labor was rampant, and safety nets were nonexistent. However, their method of dealing with the threat – violent resistance – failed.
Two centuries later, the word “Luddite” has long been shorthand for someone hostile to new technology. And today we face our own looms, only now they hum in code and computation. Like the Luddites, workers today see their livelihoods under pressure. But smashing servers or banning algorithms will not stop this revolution.
If the lesson of 1811 is anything, it is this: Technology cannot be unmade once it takes root – but workers can choose how to meet it.
AI-Driven Layoffs: Specifics, Not Sensationalism
AI is a real factor — but it’s not the whole story.
Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which has tracked job cuts for decades, reports more than 30,000 layoffs in 2025 linked to AI or automation, including 10,375 citing AI explicitly and another 20,219 tied to “technological updates.” July alone saw a 140% increase in job-cut announcements over the prior year, according to a Challenger report from a month ago.
High-profile examples of layoffs abound. According to a recent Business Insider story, the Pittsburgh-based language learning company Duolingo reduced about 10% of its contract workforce, acknowledging that AI tools could now generate the language content once built by humans. Additionally, IBM has continued its partial hiring freeze in HR and administrative roles, saying AI will increasingly cover those functions.
Yet not all companies are cutting. Global consulting giant Accenture has slowed hiring, but rather than jettison staff, it is redeploying them into AI-related functions — a strategy that treats AI as augmentation rather than elimination.
The takeaway: AI is accelerating change, but the story is more complex than “robots took my job.”
Hiring: It’s Not Less — It’s Different
While some roles shrink, AI fluency opens doors elsewhere.
Indeed’s Hiring Lab finds tech job postings overall remain down 36% from February 2020, just before COVID-19 changed everything. The steepest declines have been in software engineering and IT support.
At the same time, roles that mention AI or machine learning have exploded (see graph below). Since 2020, postings for machine learning engineers are up nearly 60%, and those referencing generative AI have surged 334%, according to HR Dive.
And it isn’t just Silicon Valley. Employers in marketing, healthcare, law, education, and accounting increasingly expect workers to use AI tools for research, drafting, or analysis. PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer confirms the shift: jobs requiring AI skills grew 7.5% in 2024 even as overall postings fell 11.3%, and workers with AI fluency now command a 56% wage premium.
Cornell’s arXiv study adds that AI jobs aren’t just better paid; they also offer important perks. AI postings are twice as likely to offer parental leave and three times as likely to include remote work – in addition to salaries 12–20% higher than comparable roles without those perks.
Conclusion: Companies may be hiring fewer people overall, but they’re hiring differently — rewarding those who show they can work alongside AI.
The challenge is not to smash the new looms but to learn how to work with them.
Who’s Most at Risk? The Young and the Inexperienced
Not all workers feel the AI shock equally.
A new Stanford study found that employment among workers aged 22–25 in AI-exposed roles — customer service, basic coding, data entry — has already fallen by 6%. Meanwhile, for workers aged 35–49 in similar jobs, employment rose by up to 9%.
The explanation is simple. Entry-level tasks are the easiest to automate. Consider the new college graduate looking for that first rung on the ladder. In the past, they might have started in a support role — drafting routine briefs, coding bug fixes, or fielding customer queries — work that gave them a foothold in their chosen field. Increasingly, those “starter tasks” are being handled by AI. The stepping-stone is gone.
Now think about the junior paralegal, financial analyst, or marketing associate. Once these were roles for building skills; now AI systems are drafting discovery documents, combing through spreadsheets, and generating campaign outlines. These aren’t glamorous jobs, but they taught new hires the craft. If AI swallows them whole, young workers miss out on the proving grounds every profession requires.
In The Skill Code, Matt Beane sketches out why this is problematic not just for individuals, but societally, as entire professions will be in trouble if they don’t have humans to learn the trade and work their way up through the ranks. Who will know enough to become the future leaders of their profession? Colorado AI News contributor Bob Rose discussed this predicament a year ago in his review of the book.
In the meantime, older cohorts often benefit from their head start. A mid-career accountant can learn to let an AI spreadsheet assistant churn through the bulk work, then apply her judgment to the exceptions. A project manager can offload scheduling to an AI agent and focus on client strategy. Their experience gives them a platform for adaptation.
But let’s be clear: adaptation isn’t automatic. Many older workers are still struggling, and some will resist change until it costs them dearly. Everyone can adapt, but younger workers face an uphill battle because the entry-level rungs they need are disappearing fastest.
This trend is not unique to the U.S. Across the pond, EU labor studies and reports from the UK’s Office for National Statistics echo the same finding: it is the inexperienced who face the sharpest impact first. The weak point of every technological revolution is the gap it creates for those trying to enter.
And yet…
Of course, a few Gen Z’ers are absolutely killing it: The Wall Street Journal had a story last week about some AI-skilled 20-somethings making $200,000 and up. As the article makes clear, “There is a significant salary difference between a machine-learning engineer job and a software-engineer job,” quoting Professor Anil K. Gupta at the University of Maryland’s business school.
Echoing that assessment is the CEO of Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, who said, “We definitely have people, quite junior people, that have big impact, and they’re getting paid a lot. Under 25, you can be making a million.”
And further flipping the switch on the conventional wisdom, he claimed, “We can’t for the life of us get the more senior people to adopt [AI].”
Which just goes to show that the opportunities are out there, no matter who you are.
The Labor Market: Steady on the Surface, Shifting Below
On paper, the U.S. economy looks stable. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported unemployment at 4.2% in July 2025, a figure many economists consider near “full employment.” Health care and social assistance continue to add jobs.
But look closer and the ground wobbles. Employers added just 187,000 jobs in July — below expectations. Job openings hover near 8.8 million, well off their 2022 peak. Workers are staying put: the voluntary resignation rate — what the BLS politely calls the “quits rate” — is at a decade low. In other words, people don’t feel confident leaving their jobs, fearing the grass on the other side may already be automated.
And the divides by industry are striking:
- Winners: Health care continues to expand, adding 33,000 jobs in July alone, according to the BLS. AI development itself is a jobs engine: the AI & Data Science postings tracked by PwC rose more than 30% in the past year.
- Losers: Clerical roles, from payroll processing to paralegal research, are shrinking as AI-driven systems handle routine paperwork. Customer-service centers are cutting staff as generative chatbots scale. Traditional IT support has contracted, with Indeed’s Hiring Lab showing declines of over 40% in postings since pre-pandemic highs.
- On the cusp: Finance and professional services are treading cautiously. Firms are piloting AI for risk analysis, marketing, and contract review, but not yet cutting widely. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report notes that 74% of executives cite ‘AI augmentation’ as a top challenge in workforce planning, underscoring that reshaping is coming, even if its timing remains uncertain.
Looking ahead, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2025 reports that 81% of business leaders expect to deploy AI agents extensively within 12-18 months. Today’s surface calm could be tomorrow’s acceleration.
In short: Overall, the labor market’s headlines look fairly calm, and yet just underneath the surface it feels anything but.
AI literacy is becoming the baseline of the 21st century.
The AI Manifesto: A Call to Action
Neither corporations nor governments are moving fast enough. Companies pledge reskilling, but the results resemble New Year’s resolutions — earnestly declared and swiftly forgotten. Budgets are tightening and large-scale government retraining looks unlikely.
That leaves only one lever: individual action.
The challenge is not to smash the new looms but to learn how to work with them.
Take the student who has just graduated from college and is staring at a thin résumé. In the past, they might have padded it with a summer job in customer service. Today, that rung has been replaced by a chatbot. But by experimenting with AI tools, they can instead add a concrete line: “Automated weekly social posts using generative AI; cut drafting time 70%.” That single project shows fluency and initiative.
Now, consider the mid-career analyst. She has produced the same monthly report for years, painstakingly building tables and charts. With an AI copilot, she rebuilds the workflow: the system drafts, she audits, and the finished report ships in half the time. The value is not that she “knows AI,” but that she demonstrates measurable productivity gains.
Or picture the small business owner. Once reliant on word-of-mouth, he now uses an AI writing tool to generate two new SEO-friendly (and Generative Engine Optimization-friendly!) web pages every month. He edits them carefully, adds a personal touch, and watches his lead-to-close rate tick upward. The technology didn’t replace him; it gave him leverage.
The lesson is the same across these vignettes: document your progress, show tangible results, and pair human strengths — creativity, ethics, judgment — with AI’s speed and scale.
And above all, recognize this is not optional. Just as literacy itself became a baseline expectation in the 20th century, AI literacy will be the baseline of the 21st.
Conclusion: The Looms We Cannot Smash
Two centuries ago, Ned Ludd’s followers broke the looms and were crushed. Today, the new looms are algorithms. Smashing them is neither possible nor wise. But failing to learn them is just another form of surrender.
Looking past the historical – and ongoing – battles for workplace rights, remember this: No one will fight harder for your future than you. The call to arms in 2025 is not to resist AI, but to master it — or risk getting left behind.
