2025 saw roughly 1.17 million job cuts announced thus far, marking the first year since 2020 that we've breached the 1.1 million mark. We're watching massive layoffs across every sector, UPS announced 48,000 cuts, Amazon up to 30,000, Intel 24,000, and Microsoft, Meta, Verizon all joining the carnage. One of the real culprits here is AI and automation. Companies are realizing they can replace entire job categories with software. UPS deploys automated sorting, Amazon's warehouses run increasingly robotic operations, and every company is asking, why hire when we can build AI? Each quarter brings new capabilities that make previously impossible automation suddenly viable. The acceleration is real and it's only getting faster. But here's the thing, this doesn't mean the economy implodes. Every major tech disruption has destroyed jobs while creating entirely new ones. Think about ATMs, they didn't kill banking, they expanded it. The internet vaporized classified ads or created digital advertising worth hundreds of billions. AI will eliminate low value, repetitive work or companies get more efficient, invest in new products, and need people to build them. The real risk isn't permanent job loss, it's a brutal transition period where a 50 year old customer service rep can't instantly become an AI trainer. That's where policy actually matters. If we manage the transition well, we get another economic cycle with better paying jobs. If we don't, we're looking at increased inequality or political chaos. Either way, the companies doing the automating win short term, but the macro story plays out over the next 5-10 years.