Many firms are now slashing their number of new hires.

Yes. This sucks.

The main cause of this is artificial intelligence

Unlikely.

The main cause for a chill in hiring tends to be uncertainty about the future. And we know that folks are feeling high uncertainty about the future, right now. (Gestures broadly at current headlines in general and "Not The Onion", in particular.)

Historically, uncertainty about the future is particularly high when the people have low confidence that existing and new laws will be applied in a predictable manner.

I'll leave exactly what changed on that front as a thought exercise.

AI is interesting, but it is not the primary cause of the chill in hiring new graduates.

just need to change your name to "AI" and suddenly every company will want you

More lifehacks next time

Don't sell your self short like that. I've been working since 2003 in engineering and I wouldn't trust anything that came out of an AI without confirming it with someone with a degree.

Additionally, think of AI as a librarian with photographic memory. It will never ask the right questions. Additionally its memory is influenced by what it has read and its not photographic is mixographic...it will remix any text you give it. Best it can do is not misspell words. Otherwise you can't trust anything it returns.

You on the other hand can do all sorts of knowledge gathering, inferring, etc and make knowledge based decisions rather than text based decisions.

Who could have seen this coming!

Remember the meme about everyone could have a 32 hour work week and three-day weekends (and a productivity boost) but the billionaires are opposed?

Well everyone could have post-scarcity communism but the billionaires are opposed.

Shouldn't that be "wasn't"?