AI robots are stealing college grads’ jobs in 2025’s ‘Summer of Hallucination’

Always wear sunscreen. You might need it on the unemployment line.

This spring’s commencement speeches just wrapped up, and most college grads got the usual good if vague advice. Eagles star receiver A.J. Brown told the University of Mississippi’s graduating seniors that “your discipline is your product, your name is your brand, your habits are your investments.” At Maryland, Sesame Street’s Kermit the Frog kept it simple in his much-ballyhooed address: “Life is like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.”

But the most important message for 2025 grads last month wasn’t uttered on a college campus. “AI” — artificial intelligence — “is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,” Dario Amodei warned.

Who’s Dario Amodei? Good question — I’d never heard of him either before last week. He’s the 42-year old CEO of a leading AI firm called Anthropic, and he has a better understanding than most folks about where the 2020s’ fast-moving revolution in generative artificial intelligence is headed. And where that is, he claims, is a wipeout for many jobs, but especially the kind of white-collar entry-level positions where 22-year-olds used to head with their sheepskin. Amodei said the result could be 10-20% unemployment in a year to five years — roughly Great Depression levels.

“Most of them [workers] are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.” He’s right. America’s policy makers and lawmakers — led by a president who sees the AI revolution as very much compatible with his anti-democratic new world order — are sleeping through an earthquake no one was ready for.

And 2025 graduates are already feeling the first tremors. Some have taken to sites like Reddit, wondering why — after borrowing heavily to earn degrees in finance or computer science — no one has responded to the hundreds of resumes they’ve sent out.

“I just feel pretty screwed as it is right now,” psychology major Julia Abbott, graduating from Virginia’s James Madison University, told NBC News in a report on this summer’s slowing job market. She said she’s applied to over 200 roles in social media and marketing, but “minimal interviews come out of it.”

To be sure, corporations’ race to task AI-driven computers with work once performed by humans isn’t the only reason the once white-hot employment scene for entry-level jobs has cooled down. Many firms are rattled by Donald Trump’s wildly erratic tariff policies, and related predictions that the U.S. economy is headed for a recession. But most experts say the slow drip of robots taking our jobs is accelerating, and the numbers back this up.

Oxford Economics is reporting that the jobless rate for college grads ages 22 to 27 has spiked to 6%, compared to 4% for the general population. This suggests that essential work like construction or nursing is still doing OK but the job market for data analysts or code writers might be slipping.

One bellwether company is Facebook’s parent Meta, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already said he’s cutting the workforce by 5% as he looks for AI to replace human workers like mid-level engineers or the company’s risk assessment team.

A long time ago, in an America that seems far, far away, the top political mantra was: It’s the economy, stupid. And so you might expect that the body politic would spring to action to regulate the new technologies with an eye toward saving jobs, jobs, jobs ... but that’s not what’s happening.

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Trump owes his election in good measure to his alliance with a Mountainhead of free-spending Silicon Valley tech billionaires, led by Elon Musk (with X’s AI platform Grok and Tesla’s self-driving cars) and his record $277 million investment in the GOP candidate. The president has placed Musk pal David Sacks in charge of AI, which is kind of like naming Colonel Sanders to oversee the poultry sector. Even smart, respectable lawmakers say we need to go all-in on AI to stay ahead of China. When the grand prize is a 1930s soup kitchen economy? Really?

Summer is upon us: that anticipated season with the most memorable songs and an electric vibe that make you want to hang a name upon those hazy, hot, endless days. In 1967, a patchouli-scented season of love-ins at Golden Gate Park amid a soundtrack of Sgt. Pepper and Jefferson Airplane gave America the Summer of Love, despite the irony that riots ripped apart major U.S. cities like Newark and Detroit.

Some 58 years later, our nation is experiencing an acid flashback, the Summer of Hallucination. This is true on several levels, one of them almost literal. That’s because those big corporations racing to fire their engineers or writers and replace them with AI aren’t giving their new robots a drug test. “Hallucinations” happen in artificial intelligence because these machines that sift through so much data so fast — not unlike your Fox News-addicted uncle — can’t easily tell what’s truth or fiction. For all of Silicon Valley’s futuristic bravado, AI’s hallucinations are getting worse, not better.

And the consequences can be serious. Last month, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a “Make America Healthy Again” report it hailed as the centerpiece of its strategy for improving child health, even as it disputed accepted vaccine and other medical science. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the findings were “gold-standard” research, but reporters found the document was not only riddled with errors but cited seven scientific studies that don’t exist — possibly the most hallucinations to come from an RFK Jr. product since his drug-dealing days at Harvard.

But it’s not just government. My own newspaper, The Inquirer, was embarrassed recently when it distributed a syndicated supplement from a longtime-trusted partner, King Features (the Sunday comics folks), who’d hired a writer who used AI to compile a list of 2025’s hot summer books. Most of them — as you’ve probably guessed by now — were never written. Yes, robots can do some things better than humans — none more so than spread disinformation.

And yet the real reason we’re living through the Summer of Hallucination runs much deeper. It’s all too fitting that for the last year, the avatar of American politics — arguably, at times, more so than Trump — has been the world’s richest person, Musk. The Silicon Valley mogul took a chainsaw to the federal government after a fall campaign season during which, according to the New York Times, the Tesla CEO was overdoing his acknowledged ketamine use but also dabbling in Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.

But turn on the news this morning and you’ll be wondering if it’s Musk that’s hallucinating, or us. Even the true headlines — from the serious of immigrant college kids snatched off the streets by government men wearing ski masks, to the sublime of Trump’s commencement speech that told West Point grads to avoid trophy wives — are shrouded in an aura of utter disbelief. But underneath you’ll find a cesspool of disinformation that’s migrated from Fox News to Macedonian teenagers to AI robots. Garbage in, garbage out.

No wonder our world feels drenched in electric Kool-Aid, and yet no one is willing to stand athwart this robot Ecstasy bash and yell, “Stop!” Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill that just passed the House and could become law includes a provision that would bar states from regulating AI for 10 years, ensuring that the Silicon Valley-purchased Trump regime will let Big Tech stamp its robot revolution in indelible ink.

There’s been little or no public debate about the lack of AI regulations, even as the warning of a human job apocalypse isn’t the only way that programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are threatening the planet. The massive energy demand for powering these supercomputers makes little sense amid a crisis of global warming, and overuse of AI by students could turn the brains of our younger generations into pulp. Yet in America’s Summer of Hallucination, no one is seeing through the purple haze.

“We are now closer than ever to a world in which tech companies can seize land, operate their own currencies, reorder the economy and remake our politics with little consequence,” Silicon Valley journalist and author Karen Hao wrote in the New York Times. “That comes at a cost — when companies rule supreme, people lose their ability to assert their voice in the political process and democracy cannot hold."

Exactly. It seems trite to say that creating a future that harnesses what is actually good about AI and regulates the bad should be a front-burner issue in the 2028 presidential campaign, because in three and a half years our new robot overlords may already be running things. A more likely scenario is that 20% unemployment will trigger massive social unrest among torch-wielding 23-year-olds replaced by computers. If society continues to do nothing, the nightmare potential of AI is worse than your wildest hallucinations. But like Kermit says: Keep believing, keep pretending.

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