Dictionary

jobpocalypse en · NOUN

Etymology

From job + -pocalypse. The "caused by artificial intelligence" sense may have popularized by the Financial Times newspaper in late 2025.

Meanings

1. (humorous, informal, sometimes) A period of high unemployment or job losses.
   • Mayhem up ahead? Cosmo's got you, girl. The Ultimate Job-pocalypse Survival Guide 2018 January, “The Ultimate Job-pocalypse Survival Guide”, in Cosmopolitan:
   • The growing role of technology to do jobs that have been the domain of the laboring class, such as moving goods through a warehouse, launched a thousand prognostications in recent years from study groups and universities about a coming "jobpocalypse" for blue-collar workers. And jobs have been and continue to be lost, though others, such as building and maintaining robots, have been created. 2019 November 21, Christopher Quinn, “Study: AI threatens white-collar jobs: Atlanta among top 10 cities expected to be most affected”, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, page A.13:
   • The other issue is that as a nation and a society, we are woefully unprepared for the coming jobpocalypse. The regular working people on the right have been so heinously misled that they are worried about immigrants taking the jobs they don’t want instead of focusing on robots taking the jobs they already have. 2018 July 19, Broke-Ass Stuart, “Note to tech industry: How about asking, ‘Should we do this?’”, in San Francisco Examiner:
   • When the nation first went through high rates of unemployment recently, it wasn’t just a job crisis; it was a jobpocalypse or a hiring-pocalypse. 2012, Nicole Cammorata, Words You Should Know 2013: The 201 Words from Science, Politics, Technology, and Pop Culture That Will Change Your Life This Year, page 168:
2. (specifically) The widespread technological unemployment expected to be caused by advances in artificial intelligence.
   • But if a generative AI-driven "jobpocalypse" for computer science graduates doesn't seem to explain the graduate male malaise, what does? 2025 July 9, John Burn-Murdoch, “Why joblessness is increasing for male graduates: Opinion Data Points”, in Financial Times, page 8:

Forms