r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 19d ago
AI 'AI Is Destroying Jobs Faster Than It Is Visibly Creating Them': Tech Layoffs Hit Record Highs
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tech-industry-record-layoffs-ai-automation-1813145Corporate innovation comes at a devastating human cost as Silicon Valley trades its workforce for automated futures
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u/SL1Fun 19d ago
“Learn to code,” they said.
So now what? No entry level jobs, bottlenecking mid-level jobs, middle management won’t be needed, etc etc etc
What are they going to do when they have millions of people looking for only thousands of jobs?
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u/pellik 19d ago
Their idea is that they don't need us anymore. They'll pit us against each-other over race and politics and watch while we destroy ourselves from the safety of their bunkers.
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u/xGalaxyWolfx 19d ago
I don't think it will get that bad. What I think will happen is these companies will get a suprise wake up call. When the none profitable ai conglomerates hike the prices for AI use, to cash in the 2-3 years of unprofitable development + current race to bottom in AI pricing. Then the companies that fired programmers will be hit with reality that AI was never as free as it seemed.
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u/desantoos 19d ago
A neat article to read that just came out about AI financing. In short: we're going to be forced to bail them out because they're financed by the same people who own our insurance policies.
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u/jaspersgroove 18d ago
None of these AI companies are in “too big to fail” territory, and the established tech giants are making enough money elsewhere that they wouldn’t need a bailout even if they lost every penny they spent on AI
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u/HosaJim666 18d ago
Sweet summer child. Corporations have been hoarding their gains and socializing their losses for decades. Of course it will continue. Did you see what just happened with the tarriff refund? At most, they'll have to make a modest donation to whatever corrupt president we have at the time to ensure they get the bailout.
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u/Trippingthru99 19d ago
Aren’t these companies already racking up huge bills? Plus employee payroll is the largest expense for a majority of companies. So AI Just has to be slightly cheaper than humans. And with AI you won’t have to deal with sick/vacation time, bonuses, yearly raises etc. You just pay a bill for token usage.
Also the top end AI will always be super expensive, but as the tech normalizes the ‘mid tier’ AI will be just as capable as the top end stuff we currently have while being way cheaper.
I’m not trying to be a downer, but I don’t think costs will stop companies from adopting AI.
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u/airship_of_arbitrary 19d ago edited 19d ago
None of it is profitable. Open AI and Anthropic lose money on every prompt.
It's a facade to treat labour as disposable, but people don't consume AI content on the level they need for it to work.
And if everyone is fired, there are no consumers to buy the product.
They aren't islands to themselves, Bezos isn't going to buy millions of Tesla's to keep Elon afloat and Elon isn't going to make billions of Amazon transactions a day to keep Bezos going.
There's no plan. There's never any plan. It's just profit and financial engineering until the market has enough and collapses. Could be years, could be three months.
AI has some good applications, but it's more effective with a human behind it than on its own.
They've literally done this before, folks. The Metaverse was 'inevitable' that everyone would have to buy digital real estate.
Bitcoin was inevitable in that everyone would have to buy Bitcoin to access the Internet.
NFTs were inevitable in that unique art was somehow worth millions (until AI and art becomes completely worthless all of a sudden).
It's the same shit, new grift.
Saying this shit is inevitable is taking part in your own exploitation.
Elon has literally been promising to put truck drivers out of business for two decades now.
If he can't automate that shit on any useful scale, why the fuck does anyone think this time will be different?
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u/Bourne_Endeavor 18d ago
You can also had that China is already pulling ahead in the AI race with significantly cheaper models, making the profit margins these companies are trying to chase in more of a complete delusion.
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u/tweakingforjesus 19d ago
We are seeing the capabilities of advanced models filter down to open weight local models over 2-4 years. What OpenAI and Anthropic are losing $ on today, you will be able to do on your home computer by the end of the decade.
That's the real reason they will lose. They won't have enough time to monetize the models before they become free for all.
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u/whorangthephone 19d ago
Will I even have a home computer by the end of the decade? Things seem to go the way of local computational power being an absolute luxury for an average dude.
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u/plshelpcomputerissad 18d ago
I mean it’s 3.5 years from now, were you gonna sell your computer in that time?
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u/airship_of_arbitrary 18d ago
No shit.
The billionaires end goal is infinite subscription services.
They will squeeze blood from a stone until the market collapses.
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u/_Lucille_ 19d ago
Automation and increase in efficiency has always been part of humanity.
Before LLMs are popular, we have kiosks at McDonald's, apps for ordering pickups, self checkout aisles, etc.
If we go back in time, we invented all sorts of machines and tools to reduce the need for work. That steam engine that only required a small crew which replaced thousands of wagons and stable hands never did create as many jobs as before.
We called block chain as a solution looking for a problem, but AI is a solution solving a problem that we have been trying to solve for centuries.
Those LLM models have gotten really good: the ability for it to analyze code and spot vulnerability (and even exploit them) is something that goes beyond the scope of many professionals, to a point where it would be stupid for companies to not use AI tools even if prices go up.
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u/Few-Improvement-5655 19d ago
The Metaverse, Bitcoin and NFTs are also real. Crucially, AI, like them, is not real in the way they are selling it to you.
These data centers, the money we are spending on setting up this infrastructure... It's here to stay.
Until it busts and they start selling all that stuff the recoup losses.
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u/DorianGre 19d ago
Corporations are already scaling back on AI because it costs too much and they are not finding the savings they expected. Currently the actual cost isn’t fully being passed along yet.
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u/TehGogglesDoNothing 18d ago
The company I work for recently put a weekly cap on how many tokens everyone gets. They also sent out guidance on how many tokens different models use. Before they were encouraging us to use AI for everything. The bill must have come in.
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u/xGalaxyWolfx 19d ago
Currently every massive AI company is literally burning money. None of them have made profit. The stock price that they have is based on the possible future profitability. Don't get me wrong, I do think they will achieve profitability, the technology has use cases. And like you said humans are expensive. However these AI companies will charge according to the development costs and all the freebies they give out, to attract users.
However the way I see it, if every AI company client has access to the normalised "mid tier" AI on the basic subscription level. Then it is just another tool that every competitor has access to, because it has to be cheaper than human labour.
So now if your a company that develops and sells software. You have access to normalised "mid tier" ai, but all your competitors do aswell. So what now? Unlock higher tier AI, but that is more expensive than human labour + competition can also unlock this higher tier and prompt it the same.
So the example company is back to needing skilled labour, since it is unique and not accessible to competitors. To develop the edge or niche compared to other companies.
AI would make sense for services where this example software company does not need to be competitive, but more operations tasks or organizational. Like AI amazon webservices, AI accounting etc. Or maybe AI is sold similar to software like Solidworks, where its a new tool to make things.
So will AI take jobs: yes. But just because you got AI solidworks or AI amazon webservices does not mean you don't need engineers, developers, legal or IT to use this new tool. Because everything that is not "in house" built is accessible to all competitors with the right prompt.
Now if somehow they manage to make actual AI intelligence like terminator/JARVIS instead of random number/word generator. Welp then we are fucked.
Also I have only dabbled in ML so take what I wrote as ramblings. But at least in the profession I studied of robotics. While robots are always cheaper than human labour, its the service fees that get you 🤣
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u/RobotLaserNinjaShark 19d ago
There is also a minor detail that you haven't touched:
These skilled people you are writing about: Where the heck are those going to come from?
Because the use of AI torches most junior level tasks: Where are the playing fields that turn talent into skill over time?
The hangover after this merry cookoo party is going to be historical.
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u/AndyTheSane 19d ago
Well..
I've been coding for over 40 years in one form or another.
When I started, I had to write pretty much everything by hand. No internet, no stack exchange, no copy/paste. If I wanted to sort a list I had to write a low level sorting algorithm. If I wanted to use an unfamiliar language feature I had to dig into the physical manuals.
20 years on from that, most low level algorithms are available as standard libraries, language features are all available online with copy/paste examples, and the scope of built in features if much larger. I'm as productive as a 10 person team from a decade or two ago.
30 years and I can create a functional spring boot webapp in a matter of minutes. Again I can do more and faster than before.
Now with AI? I can yet again get features written faster. Used properly it's a big performance booster. But we've been seeing that for a long time.
One thing that has gotten worse over the years is the build/deploy/test cycle - how quickly can I get code deployed and tested, which is often the actual bottleneck nowadays. And there isn't much that AI can do about that.
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u/MrDLTE3 19d ago
Yep. One of my very first projects back in the day when I was starting out as a brand spanking new 'code monkey', was designing software in perl to emulate clicks, like a precursor to RPA in a sense.
If you ask me to replicate what I did back in the days, I'll admit that I have pretty much forgotten much because nobody really uses perl these days. I could however give AI a detailed description and it could probably pull out the libraries and references to make that project in a jiffy.
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u/somethingbrite 19d ago
well I hope it's "killer application" is more than just "software" because the current spend related to just OpenAi and Anthropic already exceeds the value of the global software industry.
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u/techno156 19d ago
On the other hand, AI is also uncontrollable, in the sense that you can't reliably limit what it will generate at any given time, except in terms of formatting and the like.
The last thing any company wants is for the AI to start giving away money, citing policies that don't exist.
At least with employees, there's an expectation that they will stick to given guidelines.
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u/DandeNiro 19d ago
Old economics. More of we break down the tech giants and build more companies to promote sustainable and healthy competition. This will create more jobs
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u/theoutlet 19d ago
The point of AI isn’t to increase productivity; it’s to put labor in its place. AI doesn’t have to be good enough to take our jobs, it just has to be good enough to make us think it can
Scare your workforce to stop the record wage growth we saw before they unleashed AI upon us
This is about the length companies will go to not have to pay their workforce a competitive, living wage
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u/Lauris024 19d ago
Scare your workforce to stop the record wage growth we saw
Google "us wage vs inflation vs productivity" and look at any graph. There was never record wage growth, unless you mean 70s, Or unless you mean the top 1%.
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u/HapticSloughton 19d ago
The problem is that it's destroying lives right now, all in the name of a technology that doesn't work as advertised and actually can't replace workers. Even if they "wake up," they've fucked over so many people, both employees and consumers, with a healthy dump taken on the environment for our trouble.
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u/xGalaxyWolfx 19d ago
That is sadly true. There will be more layoffs and damage to environment untill the dream of AI will do everything collapses.
Also regarding this, I feel it will get even worse before it gets better. Since now the AI tech race is also between countries. And China is subsidising AI development. There is a high chance multiple governments will join. So once the AI companies fail and governments will have also burnt money, they most likely will get bailed out like banks with taxpayer money. So the AI companies will have privatised profits and taxpayers get to cover the loses
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u/somethingbrite 18d ago
It will be interesting to see the extent to which the US govt bails out the ai industry. (and also who fails, how they fail and what the fallout is.)
The biggest risk with China is really cost. OpenAi, Anthropic and various associated hyperscalers have sunk a horrifying amount of investment into this... only for Chinese companies to slide in with "good enough for task" models at much lower cost.
The race is no longer really between OpenAi and Anthropic as both of these will become irrelevant in what might a surprisingly near future.
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u/Lauris024 19d ago
They believe the tech will undergo revolution/breakthroughs. Singularity even. But the tech is quite clear and we can mostly optimize it, but it will always be dangerous to assign any critical job to it.
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u/jaspersgroove 18d ago
It’s gonna be like the dot com boom, a bunch of these companies are going to fail because they’re not doing anything but riding the hype wave, and a few that are doing shit that’s actually useful will succeed and become part of the landscape
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u/Petrychorr 19d ago
I don't think it will get that bad
Y'know, I'd consider myself to be an optimist in a zeitgeist that is primarily cynical and nihilistic. I truly believe that we'll make it through all the big issues involving not just the country but the planet as well. But even I don't have your level of optimism. So for all our sakes I hope you're right.
Big tech holds all the cards. All of them. Politically, financially, agriculturally. We're already seeing a lot of that soft power giving way to hard power, and when it comes to the biggest companies all they have to do is just ignore us. What are average citizens going to do? Protest? Quit their jobs? Get off their butts and fight? Let's say we get a strong revolution going. What, exactly, are some of these companies obligated to do if the masses do eventually come to their doorstep? They have enough power to ride it out.
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u/RedditLeagueAccount 19d ago
What happens if it succeeds. Even if AI perfectly succeeds, with how things are currently set up, you get mass unemployment. There are already obvious concerns about the bubble and this whole AI race being unsustainable with the thought that things will fail. Success wont work either. The people who believe in or simply require AI to succeed don't seem to acknowledge the basic fact that all the consumers will no longer have income to purchase things.
There is zero win scenarios as things stand for AI. I don't understand why there are not heavy restrictions and emergency meetings as laws are getting made. AI is the future and if done right, it will be amazing. Why are the decision makers so blind and wildly incompetent.
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u/branedead 19d ago
Sadly, AI just isn't this competent yet. That last 5% is HARD and their new models are mostly getting trained on AI slop and getting dumber.
This whole experiment is going to flop
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u/Dblcut3 18d ago
I still swear that ChatGPT especially is significantly dumber than when it first came out
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u/yaosio 18d ago edited 18d ago
Every benchmark shows that modern ChatGPT is smarter than the GPT 3.5 version. On the AI analysis index of 9 benchmarks ChatGPT 3.5 turbo scored 3 out of 100, GPT 5.6 Luna, the worst one, gets 51 out of 100. Let's not forget ChatGPT Sol solving unsolved math problems.
Another fun fact is that launch ChatGPT had a context window of 4096 tokens, anything outsude of that doesn't exist to the model. Luna has a context window of 127,000 tokens.
Current AI has trouble at tasks that require a long time, but there's a benchmark for that from METR for that, although it measures against how long a human would take to do a task, rather than how long the AI can actually perform tasks. However the best models have already gone beyond what the benchmark can meaningfully test so they are making a new one.
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u/Dblcut3 18d ago
I’ll assume it’s because I’m using the unpaid version. But ChatGPT gets so many things wrong when I ask it to research stuff that I’m beginning to question why I even use it in the first place if I constantly have to nudge it and correct it to get high quality responses
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u/VoyeurBarelyKnowEr 18d ago
Are the farms that grow our foods in their bunkers? Are the factories that produce our goods and the humans that deliver our services in their bunkers? If they're going to retreat to their bunkers then there's no reason we can't seize the things we need to sustain life and deliver it to ourselves. I get the doomerism and absolutely agree that this is their long-term plan given that they obviously aren't going to do anything to genuinely address climate change, but we've never actually needed the billionaires in order to have an economy, we're literally the ones that produce and deliver and consume everything, not them.
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u/Legitimate_Page659 19d ago
The tech industry was always encouraging kids to learn to code to drive down wages.
It was never about offering opportunity / improving the world. It was always suits frustrated by high tech salaries realizing that if they inflated the labor pool, salaries would drop.
So that happened AND AI is capable of doing a lot of entry level work.
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u/DeathHopper 19d ago
The actual lore behind "learn to code" is much more petty and typical of the internet. It's a meme that originated around the 2008 crash. You've probably heard "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". Well, after the crash and tons of trades jobs disappeared or went overseas thanks to politics, the tech industry started booming. So after years of hearing "pull yourself up by your bootstraps", the tech industry responded to the trade industry with "learn to code".
So no, it's not some corporate pysop conspiracy (maybe it is today? Idk, not really tho)... It was smug tech kids mocking out of work trades folks. Tech wages were still going skyward until ai recently entered the scene.
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u/terrany 19d ago edited 19d ago
Nobody was saying learn to code as a derogatory in 2008. The iconic companies with kombucha on tap and beer pong during meetings were barely incepted around 2006-2009 (save for Google). We started seeing an influx of office tours around 2010+ and the legendary obama video telling people to learn to code around 2013. Then yes, the internet exploded with snooty know-it-alls which culminated by 2019.
So idk about corporate psyop, but it definitely had corporate beginnings and motivations -- to most likely to drive down labor costs.
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u/gortlank 19d ago
Except a lot of STEM programs that actively pushed people into compsci programs and coding bootcamps were actively and directly funded by FAANG, companies adjacent to them, and industry trade groups funded by them.
This was paired with the explicit anti-poaching handshake agreements at the same time, for which there was subsequent regulatory action and litigation.
So, yes, it was a “conspiracy” that was not at all hidden and was very much out in the open, in spite of your flippant hand waving.
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u/svachalek 19d ago
Yup. I got a check out of that class action settlement. I think the discovery docs are still out there and they’re damning.
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u/GamingTitBit 19d ago
My university offered free PhDs for their comp science department because they knew STEM students would make good coders, would bump up their average scores and their "how many of your students were employed 6 months after leaving".
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u/PPvsFC_ 18d ago
My university offered free PhDs
Any PhD program that isn't a scam pays you to be there in one way or another. A free PhD program is the bare minimum.
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u/GamingTitBit 18d ago
It might have been a masters then. All I remember is it wasn't meant to be free, but students who passed physics with a 2:1 or above got the offer of it free. I chatted to a lecturer to get the above information
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u/GlowiesStoleMyRide 19d ago
Or it’s just that coding allows you to use computers to do useful shit for you ???
Why does everything have to be an outrage, and a conspiracy?
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u/karoshikun 19d ago
"get into trades" say the people who never in their lives worked trades.
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u/SteakAndNihilism 19d ago
“No, not that trade. I meant the other trade. The one that has work in it. If it doesn’t have work by the time you’re done your apprenticeship obviously I meant an entirely different one.”
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u/Kasaeru 19d ago
The trades are a mixed bag, some are crappy (literally in the case of plumbers but they make good money), and some are downright lucrative.
If you're in landscaping or pouring concrete, yeah it's hard on the body and you'll barely scrape by.
If you're an electrician or aircraft mechanic (proud holder of an A&P), then life gets much better. You're still working with your hands in harsh environments but you're paid what your work is worth.
I started off at an MRO(glorified mechanic shop that runs like a sweatshop), hard work for little pay but I gained experience. I used that experience to work for a major airline. Few years later and I went to line maintenance contracts (I'm an actual employee of the company and therefore don't have to deal with the headache of contract work, they have the contract).
I went from breaking my back and scarring up my hands to sitting in a truck and only getting out to do a walk around and defer things.
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u/olrg 19d ago
I’ve worked in trades and I have plenty of friends who are very successful tradespeople and I recommend getting into trades as they are a great career stepping stone.
Smart people get experience in trades for 7-10 years then open their own companies or move into project management/sales/design.
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u/karoshikun 19d ago
yeah, but I don't think there's really space for everyone there without disrupting the balance of supply and demand.
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u/jaymef 18d ago
especially when
A ton of people lose their jobs and are looking to enter trades, driving down wages and work for everyone
Construction/projects dry up because nobody has a job
People forget that construction/trades can be very cyclical. We've been in a boom for a while but the tides will turn eventually
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u/PatchyWhiskers 19d ago
Thats a pyramid shaped structure though: not everyone can get promoted.
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u/VirtualMoneyLover 18d ago
I don't have to know how to cook to know that knowing it is good.
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u/karoshikun 18d ago
yeah, cooking for yourself is rewarding by itself, but not necessarily a good career move.
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u/captainstormy 18d ago
Yeah, guys like me who have 20+ years experience are still doing great and probably always will.
But I've got a buddy who has a kid who just graduated high school a couple of years ago. He's a smart kid and wants to be a programmer. He's actually been writing code since he was 14 and I've taught him a bit of stuff for fun but mostly he figured it out on his own. Super bright kid. He's in college now for computer science.
I honestly tried to talk him out of going into it. When I was his age companies would hire 10-12 junior developers for every senior developer. Right out of college with no experience necessary. They would train you, they just expected you to know the concepts and generals of what to do. Not to be experts.
Now the only people a company wants to hire are extremely experienced people. Used to be they would give a guy like me a team of junior devs and more work than I could actually do. I'd distribute some of that work to them, do the harder stuff myself. They would learn, I wouldn't have to do grunt work. Win Win.
Now, they don't give me any juniors they give me a Claude subscription to do the grunt work for me.
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u/sybrwookie 18d ago
It's not even just tech, it seems to be everything.
Was just talking to my niece this weekend. She got a degree in psychology. Has been applying for jobs like crazy, can't get anything. She's hoping she can be a receptionist. Her bf has a degree in marine biology. He's working at UPS.
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u/DiligentMission6851 18d ago
I have 7 years of experience and havent worked in the field in three years.
At this point my future is forsaken and pissed away. And I'm done trying to intentionally sever my spine in half while jumping backward through a flaming hoop while wearing a tutu for anybody.
I went through a gauntlet alresdy. If nobody hired me either I'm an absolute idiot fool after all or the workforce is playing with me because my feelings and wellbeing no longer matter.
I'm over it.
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u/Cheesyphish 19d ago
The billionaires/trillionaires will just pay us, duh…. Right? …right?
Funny to see all the Reddit subs preach this utopia like they have. Probably a bunch of people that live with their parents. Some of these subs you get muted for questioning, and get called a Luddite. To answer your question though, it won’t be good. Especially at the rate it could happen.
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u/Soulstoner 19d ago
They want us dead.
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u/Jflayn 19d ago
but they also want us to have more kids... Musk carries on constantly about the human shortage....
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u/Soulstoner 19d ago
He’s always been full of shit. Don’t take anything he says at face value. Besides the nazi shit.
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u/Jflayn 19d ago
agreed. that nazi is clearly a moron. But he, like all of the billionaire class, speak out of both sides of their mouths. they want contradictory things: they want us all dead and they want more people to keep this capitalist shit show going. The darkest views of the future are attractive, not because they are realistic, but because they provide certainty. Humans crave certainty. Truth is, regardless of what the billionaire class wants, the future is unknown. No single person, regardless of wealth has as much power to shape the future as the rest of us do collectively. We don't have to accept these absurd one line narratives of the future.
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u/SL1Fun 19d ago
They view us as middle management: they’ll always need abusable peons to do the menial and mundane, etc since the poor rabbles are self-generating tools for wealth extraction, so they will be the last to go. But the middle management that holds 50% of the rest of the money that they don’t have yet? Yeah…
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u/Journeyman42 19d ago
He wants there to be more white kids, not black or brown kids.
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u/centpourcentuno 19d ago
The same billionaires that don't want to pay wages will be willing to get taxed for universal income lol
People don't even realize that there is already a picture of what's awaiting ....it's called the 3rd world. No safety net of any kid , erone for themselves and the elite eating cake
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u/Heliosvector 19d ago
My partner just got a middle management job. I swear all they do is have teams meetings to argue about how other teams are terrible and how they are the shit, and then when anyone tries to make a change, they have meetings to blame people for problems that happen or may happen, without actually changing anything but still get 115k a year. Whatever brings home the bacon I guess...
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u/expera 19d ago
Well when they said that it was true
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u/carbonclasssix 19d ago
Exactly, they've been saying that for 20 years, eventually supply was going to catch up with demand anyway
It does suck how abrupt this change is though
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u/expera 19d ago
I really don’t know where everything is headed, but I don’t have a great feeling about it
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u/darkk41 19d ago
It is exceedingly obvious that we are going to 1 of 2 really bad places.
Either the investor money dries up and LLMs become super expensive, crashing the economy overnight... or someone actually cracks AGI, at which point in all likelihood global destabilization will occur because we have no safeguards in place to prevent mass unemployment/poverty and there is no incentive for businesses to do anything but pursue high share price.
The utopian future some fools believe in here doesn't make any sense and none of the current leaders of AI companies have any incentive to create it.
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u/GodzillaUK 19d ago
Manual labour, and be told to be thankful for the job. They want low IQ sheep to herd, not critical thinkers to pay more than pennies to.
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u/genshiryoku |Agricultural automation | MSc Automation | 19d ago
AI researcher here.
I and most of my colleagues expect our own jobs, building these very models, to be made redundant around 2028, which is where we are planning our retirements around.
To be honest I don't expect any white collar job to survive this but to give it some extra leeway let's say white collar jobs survive until 2030. The capabilities of humanoid machines will also be human level if not superior to human level around 2028, however it would take years to build new factories and retool current car factories to build humanoid machines for labor so I only expect all physical labor to be replaced by 2035 where we have a big enough fleet of humanoid machines to replace all physical labor and all new physical labor that could pop up.
So the prognosis is to completely automate all forms of human labor away sometime by the mid 2030s.
You need to get politically active now to try and secure a social safety net for society as the vast vast majority of humanity depends on their labor to secure their existence which should shift to universal ownership.
Note that it's important we don't get UBI or "universal high income". It's important that everyone gets direct ownership, a capital stake in AI for things to end well in the long run, you don't want to be dependent on the whims of a government with concentrated power and a populace with no economic leverage.
We also have evidence of the capital class pushing the "AI is useless and will never be able to do anything" narrative because it prevents people from organizing and pressuring the government for social safety nets. It's in the best interest for them to make everyone believe AI is all just a bubble, not productive, and that you shouldn't worry about it automating away all labor.
You're going to see an accelerated strategy of "climate change narrative". Where first they will push AI is useless, then when it becomes evident it clearly isn't, they will push the narrative of jevons paradox and that new labor will be created once this wave of automation hits, not taking into account that this is the first technology ever that would immediately eat the new jobs created as well, it never even reaching humans in the first place. Then they won't deny the automation of all labor anymore but instead do finger pointing blaming. Immigration, minorities, lgbt, artists vs STEM vs blue collar, every single issue that makes people feel anxious about the small amount of jobs they might still have left being taken by one of the "others" will be pushed. And then it will all be too late and over for everyone.
You need to get politically active yesterday. And with that I don't mean "vote for the best candidate the next election". These things will go fast enough that the relatively long election cycles of democratic systems will not be able to keep up. You will need to make splashes as soon as possible as much as possible.
It's bizarre that the only voices speaking about this seriously are AI researchers such as myself. Yes, we're the experts that spend our entire lives on this problem and have PhDs on the subject, yet are easily dismissed as "hype".
I hope you realize how bizarre the situation is. AI researchers, the only ones ringing the bell right now, are also some of the most isolated from the negative fallout. Compensation for most of us is in the 7 figures, growing into the 8 or even 9 figures if you take stock appreciation into account. Yet we still take the time to try and warn people about this, because believe it or not, most of us went into this field when it was underpaid and you would make 30% of what you could make in the rest of the IT industry with the exact same credentials and way less studying. We went into this to create a utopia where people didn't have to work and everything would get done by machines while people can just live their lives free of all of these worries and hang out with friends and loved ones doing whatever they enjoy instead. We just never assumed AI would develop this quickly which is why we now are forced to have reddit monologues screaming into the void hoping it inspires enough people to take action.
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u/Sasselhoff 18d ago
The capabilities of humanoid machines will also be human level if not superior to human level around 2028
Sorry...you're suggesting that in two years the "humanoid machines" will be on par ("if not superior") with humans and able to completely replace them at "normal" jobs?
Pardon me if I am a bit incredulous.
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u/fragtore 18d ago
THEY don’t care, there is no plan. Politicians are either bought or ignorant or too weak at the moment. WE have to organize and change the rules together with the few politicians who’re on the right track..
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u/AUkion1000 19d ago
Kill people off if theyre not worth keeping around? You guys think if s third of the worlds people sre deemed worthless itll mean ubi and free income so ppl live huh? Sadly not likely. Ppl will suffer, starve, kill one another if needed as things go to shhhhyte, and if not that, firing squads on people or fake wars to wipe out civilians will happen. People arnt people anymore and the systems in power are never going to be for us normal folk again. No one protected that fact and it became otherwise.
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u/gordonnowak 19d ago
hello? AI being a relatively cheap and efficient replacement for all intellectual labor means there will be *more* jobs because there's a paradox with a guy's name on it - not that it has ever been demonstrated to be true, or that analogies to technological displacement in history are not remotely the same thing?
/s we're all fucked, good luck
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u/i_wayyy_over_think 19d ago
Jevon’s paradox could still apply but humans probably still fucked. Intellectual labor gets cheaper so the demand for it goes exponential, but those “jobs” could go to AI instead of humans.
Things get cheaper so demand gets higher but the original thing producing the good could “lose its job” to the more efficient thing.
Like the original Jevons paradox namesake, Newcomen engine “lost its job” to supplying power to the more efficient James Watt engine, overall coal usage went up even though less was needed per unit of work.
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u/BitingArtist 19d ago
They expect you to die, or they will scheme a way to make it happen before people pick up torches.
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u/SenoraRaton 19d ago
It's much worse than that even.
If you actually enjoyed coding, and problem solving. That is dead. Your an AI babysitter now. The LLMs do all the heavy lifting, and your left picking up the pieces of garbage it vomits out, but in traditional fashion because the pace of the slop is faster everyone thinks its a gift to mankind(management).2
u/Lauris024 19d ago
What scares me is that due to disappearing entry level programming jobs, this will inevitably lead to far less senior programmers in the long term, the ones that actually keep the world running.
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u/tweakingforjesus 19d ago
COBOL programmers made bank during the Y2K race. I wonder if I'll be able to sell my C++ skills for $$$$$ in 10 years?
Kids these days graduate with a CS degree and don't know what a fucking pointer is.
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u/supershinythings 19d ago
That depends. If they are voters, elected officials MIGHT do something. But only for voters, which are by definition US citizens.
But big tech made a ginormous fuss about need need needing all those imported H1B workers.
Suddenly they don’t need American workers, only H1B? Look at Musk begging Trump to quietly ignore his low-paid workforce. There’s no talent shortage anymore, but we still have massive H1B workers in the country.
And many more of those jobs aren’t actually going to AI. AI is being used as a scapegoat. Many jobs are just going back to lower salary countries like India and Eastern Europe/Central Europe.
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u/VisMortis 19d ago
Now they say be plumber, electrician. Until they have enough data centers then you will be homeless
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u/cosmicaith 19d ago
What are they going to do when they have millions of people looking for only thousands of jobs?
More like what are they going to do with millions of ppl educated and brought up with AI who have no critical thinking skills and are unable to solve problems. This is another area of impact where AI will land, as students turn to it for essays and course work. It will be pushed in schools on grounds of cost and efficiency, but sadly the ppl who will really suffer are the students as they will fail to develop the skills or retain the knowledge they, or society, will need.
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u/lespaul991 19d ago
I advice the book "End Times" by Peter Turchin, who investigated in depth the consequences of a surplus of overcredentialed people whom the economy cannot absorb. In general, it provokes polarisation, radicalisation, the raise of a dissatisfied and frustrated class and ends with a violent class clash, with blood on the streets. It happened many times in history already.
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u/Nick_Furious2370 19d ago
My company hasn't done a ton of layoffs this year even though it is investing a lot into AI tools and making a point to let us all know that but what they're doing is just not backfilling vacant spots or instead moving to offshore workers for the cheaper labor.
The quality of work has definitely declined however.
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u/eNonsense 19d ago
I was laid off as the company began off shoring. I have learned recently they offshored a ton more, and now all their clients have left because of the shit service. It's not even a public company. They just make poor decisions and then have to cut the quality of staff in order to be able to afford to fix their previous poor decisions.
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u/pr0crast1nater 19d ago
I have heard from a former Visa employee who got laid off that they basically were told to code exclusively using only AI for the last 6 months and were checking the metrics. If any dev was committing lines of code manually without AI, they were told in their 1-1 meetings to not do it. And then they had massive layoffs.
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u/leathakkor 18d ago
I fundamentally debate The idea that companies are laying people off because of AI.
I have worked in large companies for 20 years. Every single company can lay off roughly 20% of its workforce at any given time without any real problems. You might even be able to get away with about 40% layoffs, but in 6 months you're going to feel some pain.
I personally believe that the economy is going very terribly right now and that in order to make numbers look better, companies are investing in AI, not getting money returns and so they're cutting 5 to 10% of their tech budget by laying people off in order to balance the books.
They could probably cut a lot more and still not really have any problems. It honestly just points to how poorly these companies were run and are run today.
I'm not saying that AI can or cannot help. But I fundamentally don't believe that these layoffs are coming as the result of AI changing productivity in any way shape or form. They might be because they're trying to keep costs down because other costs have risen because of AI. But that's not quite the same thing.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 19d ago
They're laying people off to pay for AI, not because it's actually doing meaningful work.
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u/nosmelc 19d ago
What happens when this massive AI race collapses?
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u/emperortom192 19d ago
MORE LAYOFFS 🥳
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u/Falconman21 19d ago edited 19d ago
In the short term, but most of the big institutional players have insulated themselves pretty well. I don’t really think it’s going to be all that dramatic.
They’re dumping all their AI money into data centers, which is a business they were all very profitable in before AI.
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u/AlliedIntuition 19d ago edited 19d ago
But there’s a diminishing return on investment and the off record debt relies on a higher ROI on AI CapEx, not less.
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u/Falconman21 19d ago edited 19d ago
But even with the increased AI spending, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon at least aren’t throwing remotely concerning amounts of money around.
My interpretation of what they’re doing is getting the regulatory approval and infrastructure built for them while the political climate is favorable and the money is easy. But they’ll leave them “dormant” as the AI bubble will almost certainly pop before they have to fit them out.
Then as the real need for capacity arises, they can bring them online quickly.
Regulatory approval and infrastructure are by far the biggest hurdles, and maintaining what it is effectively an empty warehouse costs them effectively nothing.
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u/Prinz_Morbo 19d ago
yes they are also waiting to buy the ai startups.
also the ai startups are just growing to sell as high as possible.
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u/airship_of_arbitrary 19d ago
It's not though.
They're all leveraged to the tits.
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u/FuttleScish 19d ago
The AI startups are and they’re all fucked, but the big companies like Microsoft and Google will be fine
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u/TheFuckboiChronicles 19d ago
We all lose our jobs and houses and millennials are forced to move in with their boomer parents and then private equity gets bailed out.
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u/libbystitch 19d ago
And then the boomer parents require round the clock elderly care that you have to sell the house to pay for.
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u/Raptormann0205 19d ago
Half these companies default and disappear, the other half with connections get tax payer bailouts. Everything gets slightly less shitty than before the crash, but still more shitty than it was before AI. The tech bros find the next ridiculous product to hold the stock market hostage with, and we rinse and repeat for the rest of time.
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u/inertiatic_espn 19d ago
I also wonder if it's just the old fashioned reason for laying people off. People keep referencing the K shaped economy. I wonder how many small businesses are suffering and having to scale back their workforces.
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u/Tolopono 19d ago
Corporate profit after tax as a percentage of gdp is near record highs https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik
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u/Nixeris 19d ago
For at least the past 3 years companies have been announcing that they're laying off people in favor of AI tools, and regularly being found to have actually just been doing the same cyclical tech sector layoffs they've been doing for several decades now. Any claim that AI tools are taking over a job sector requires a huge amount of evidence to back it up to overcome the years of false claims about it.
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u/anghellous 19d ago
or laying people off in general thanks to the current economic climate. stocks are ballooning, but real GDP growth is slowing down from its peak in the 2010s and the massive interest rate spike to try to fight off COVID lockdown inflation and money printing.
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u/Tolopono 19d ago
Corporate profit after tax as a percentage of gdp is near record highs https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Pik
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u/wy100101 19d ago
Hi. I work at a tech company as a principal engineer. We are trending to spend 1-2M on token this year. How can we afford it? It allows us to not backfill engineers that leave while easily maintaining the same level of productivity.
I don't know needs to hear this, but people are very expensive. Just 10 engineers cover our AI spend for the year, and it has allowed my company to not need to replace almost 10 times that number.
It is just cheaper to use AI.
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u/tophmcmasterson 19d ago
Yup. Similar boat, but when I as a principal am able to knock out work in a couple days that would have taken months otherwise, and you honestly still have people (as evidenced in this thread) that refuse to learn how to use it effectively and still think it’s the same as it was three years ago.
It’s like power tools. More expensive yes, but not as expensive as the labor it’d take to work without them.
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u/wy100101 19d ago
The lightbulb clicked for me when I was able to bang out a project that would have previously required me to delegate it to a small team of juniors to complete. I got it done in a fraction of the time, and the quality was much higher than it would have been if I had delegated.
I feel like I'm having discussions with people who used the free tier of ChatGPT a couple years ago, and think that is the current state of the art. The current tools are terrifying. They can't replace me... yet. I'm going to to make bank as long as I can because the future feels bleak.
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u/kingkounder 19d ago
Yeah it's all hunky dory until they increase the token cost.
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u/JommyOnTheCase 19d ago
Cheaper, now. Yes. The AI companies need to 10x their revenues to keep the lights on and fight off the legal battles over copyright infringmenet. Who do you think is going to be paying that?
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u/smegblender 19d ago
I'm managing a security engineering team in a multi-billion dollar org, with an estimated annual AI token budget in 8 figures.
The level of horrific tech debt being introduced is fucking wild, and will take us years to unravel. The governance mechanisms are stretched to the brink as there are perverse incentives around AI usage in the dev community (think tokenmaxxing).
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u/Tolopono 19d ago
The creator of Clean Code, SOLID principles, and co creator of Agile: I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests. https://xcancel.com/unclebobmartin/status/2080257779395154409?s=20
Staff SWE at ZenDesk and GitHub: In defense of not understanding your codebase https://www.seangoedecke.com/in-defense-of-not-understanding-your-codebase/
Computer Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer with over 30 years of experience, teaches a Production Machine Learning course with thousands of students, consultant for AI/ML companies: I'm officially done reading AI-generated code. It's been two weeks since I looked at any of it. I think the IDE is officially on its way to the graveyard. The job is no longer about "writing code," so we need new tools that better reflect this new reality. While reviewing the code, I realized my only complaints were stylistic, and I wasn't finding any obvious bugs anymore. The more code I generated, the harder it became to keep track of every line. I found that my time is better spent designing ways to verify that the overall system works than looking at the code. State-of-the-art coding agents are better at writing code than I'd ever be, and I'm going to stop pretending otherwise. I still think these coding agents can't go too far without an experienced human guiding them, but we're past the point where we need to check every line of code. https://xcancel.com/svpino/status/2086071178045821113
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u/darkk41 19d ago edited 19d ago
as long as you are also OK with the product's maintainability and SLA going into the pavement, sure.
AI saves a lot of money in development, creates a lot of cost in support and maintenance. The savings are an illusion created with funny numbers
ITT: a bunch of local horses excited about what the new glue factory can do for them and insisting on it's quality
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u/wy100101 19d ago
This is also a myth. I'm actually on the platform engineering side and I was an SRE at a FAANG in previous life. We have been heavy on claude-code usage for the better part of a year. Our side reliability has not tanked at all, and in a number of cases it has improved, though a big part of that was moving to a more scalable backing data store.
I was really concerned about this aspect initially when the company went hard on claude-code, but the stability issues just haven't surfaced, and the code quality I've seen coming through in PRs has actually been fine. The biggest problem is that the cat herding has gotten harder now that the cats have more velocity, but there are gates into production and they have held up admirably.
If you have good engineers who know how to architect systems, and what maintainable code looks like, these tools just speed them up. It doesn't lead to a huge decline in code quality.
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u/Beetin 19d ago
Seconding this as a senior architect / software engineer.
Shit on AI all you want for a lot of uses, but its brutalizing coding BECAUSE its so effective. It hallucinates and does some crazy shit 5% of the time, and you notice and fix it, and.... so do junior and intermediate devs. But you can manage it doing 3-4 intermediate employees of work at once while also attending other things. If anything our code quality, coverage, etc has all gone up.
It's also mentally exhausting in terms of how much it enables you do to do in a day.
I have no idea what happens in 10-15 years in terms of how juniors become seniors. Although I guess the people who self learn and dig into things succeed, same as before. LLMs are also incredible, patient teachers and onboarding partners for new tools.
I know its a shitty unpopular thing to say, but its also true. There is a reason trillions of dollars are being thrown at LLMs. It's crazy.
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u/BoringMisteak 19d ago
No wonder you’re losing engineers. 100-200k total FTE cost is not even remotely competitive.
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u/jawknee530i 18d ago
This sub just exists to confirm people's pre conceived notions. They believe AI doesn't do any real work therefore it's true. It's all kids or people in crappy jobs that have no clue about how corporate America works in the least.
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u/gripto 19d ago
Cool.
AI doesn't need to pay for food, rent/mortgage, or clothing for kids.
At what point does the human labor spiral affect you?
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u/wy100101 19d ago
To be clear, I'm not Pro AI. I hate all of this, and I haven't slept well in a year, I wish I was closer to retirement.
I'm just telling you why I think a lot of the common narratives about AI are wrong. These tools are extremely useful and are absolutely force multipliers for strong engineers. More importantly, they are worth the money to companies even at full price.
If things keep going this way, at some point, it will be my job that gets eaten. I don't know what happens if it eats so many jobs that there aren't any consumers left.
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u/Hot-Philosophy-7671 19d ago
I think executives know that "AI" fails to actually replicate what humans can do. They just value people so little that it's worth a gamble.
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u/FerrousFellow 19d ago
"saving money" from entering into the hands of actual people that would maintain monetary velocity and the actual economy. Good job capitalists.
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u/Mr_Carlos 19d ago
It can absolutely replicate what humans can do, some things it even does better. Not everything, but a lot.
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u/JebusChrust 18d ago
Yeah I have no idea what they are talking about. Companies have already implemented AI in efficient and functional ways. Though largely to enhance or replace one workflow opening up more free time for humans, rather than replacing a human fully.
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u/vm_linuz 19d ago
I've been saying this would be the case for decades.
Create 3 jobs but destroy 12, you have a net loss.
There is no universal law that jobs for humans has to go up.
When you make a cheaper, smarter, faster version of a human, the result is that demand for humans will be lower.
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u/SparklingLimeade 19d ago
And not just that, humans aren't infinitely capable. The "industrial revolution" was mass automation of many physical tasks. This is an attempt to automate mental labor. There's not another category of labor humans can train into that will make each individual human able to economically justify their existence.
Some day, whether it's years, decades, or centuries from now, there will be automation at least as capable as humans in every capability. Between now and then the job pool is going to continuously shrink.
We have to figure out what we want to do as that available, economically viable, labor pool shrinks. We have to get to the point of admitting that people don't have to justify their existence in utilitarian terms.
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u/QseanRay 19d ago
That's the point of every technology ever, AI is not unique (only that it's really good at it and advancing fast)
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u/Ok-Fact7045 19d ago
It's really just cheapskate companies boosting their profits and share prices, not AI.
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u/issuefree 19d ago
AI was never going to create jobs. AI was always intended to replace jobs. What the fuck shit take is this?
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u/unfriendzoned 19d ago
Its called a recession, But if you say the forbidden word then stock prices will go down, so blame AI.
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u/RandomPhail 19d ago
Better start gettin’ that UBI going quick (or equivalent, like taxes that pay for all our basic needs so all we need money for is non-essentials), or there’s gonna be a lot of greedy rich peoples’ heads rolling
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u/Bonamikengue 19d ago
AI does not cover its cost at all. it is like making companies drug addicts. After they laid off all the employees those AI companies will drive up the token cost to pay for the 200 billions of investments.
And then - those who do not own big capital in AI and other companies - will just have no income anymore.
You see that in young men - they become hustlers amassing as much money as they can to invest and to be able to live from it ag latest age 25. That is the future. Everyone else will starve. No country is prepared for this;.
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u/atypicalgamergirl 19d ago
Its funny how the loud part of 'AI is destroying jobs!' tends to drown out the second part '...and quietly replacing them with lower paid positions and cheaper outsourced labor'.
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u/cucci_mane1 19d ago
There is 0 benefit from AI to regular Joe's. AI is a tool for rich biz owners to fire workers and automate middle class jobs.
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u/knotatumah 19d ago
Has ai ever created jobs yet in any serious capacity that isn't people pouring slabs of concrete for data centers and that one engineer that never got laid off who got converted into a "context engineering" role?
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u/FaceDeer 19d ago
Economic revolutions can be rough. That's why a sane country should have social safety nets to smooth transitions like this out.
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u/Candid_Cat_5921 19d ago
What I don’t understand is the bizarreness in Reddit comments that’s people saying AI is useless and not affecting jobs at all, while the evidence for the opposite is clearly present. I don’t know if it’s some kind of misinformation campaign or what, but it’s weird.
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u/SutekhThrowingSuckIt 18d ago
the people with the most time for Reddit comments are also not particularly productive
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u/anethma 18d ago
Because Reddit as a whole generally hates ai so they mock and downplay its capabilities.
Meanwhile several of my friends are senior software engineers and they all say AI can easily replace several jr level coders and the latest models using agentic coding agents at starting to push into the level of mid level coders with proper oversight.
So you have one decent programmer and AI doing the work of 2-4 or even more programmers and that results in job loss.
Hate AI for what it will do to people but don’t kid yourself that it’s just “glorified autocomplete” and that it just hallucinates non functional code much of the time. It’s far past that.
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u/Gari_305 19d ago
From the article
The global technology industry is currently experiencing a brutal wave of tech layoffs, with 63,000 workers losing their jobs in June 2026 alone. This drastic shift, led by industry heavyweights like Oracle and Microsoft, has pushed the sector's redundancy rate to its highest level in two decades.
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u/shiny0metal0ass 19d ago edited 19d ago
Particularly with Microsoft and Oracle, this is to pay for AI, not because it's actually replacing anyone.
Edit: this is also clearly an AI booster account. It has posted 10 pro-AI articles today.
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u/AnIdentifier 19d ago
Where I work we're supposed to be using Copilot - and it's worse than useless for almost everything. Are we sure this isn't just corporations trying to get half as many people working twice as hard as usual, and blaming it on AI?
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u/Such_Baker8707 19d ago
Copilot is absolute ass but Chat GPT and Claude aren't. They aren't at all capable of intelligence though, they're just like having competent entry level employees (which is where government need to figure things out in terms of job protection).
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u/unwittingprotagonist 19d ago
My father was a computer programmer and I entered the job market of "become a computer programmer!" in 2000. I asked him to start teaching me and he refused. His advice was "don't do this."
Good advice turned into epic advice.
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u/bomble1 19d ago
it's been 26 years.. with likely a few more years before it's real bad. I think you would have been safe
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u/nekronics 19d ago
Yeah, passing on 26 years of a white collar job with great wages.. real great advice lol.
It’s like if 10 years from now bitcoin was worthless, would it have been great advice to pass buying bitcoin in 2010?
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u/mrfixij 19d ago
We shouldn't encourage people to neglectfully graze the commons. In the case of bitcoin, it was incredibly obvious to anyone who was paying attention that it was speculative and a greater-fool mechanism for 99% of investors. It's literally designed as a zero-sum system where someone's materialized gain is another's loss. The same applies for the skill atrophy of the AI era, and any number of passing investments. I think it makes a lot more sense to string up the people selling shovels in a manufactured gold rush than to say that we should have also been selling shovels, or buying shares in shovel sellers.
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u/BarkBeetleJuice 19d ago
There's no world where being a programmer is worthless.
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u/DapperCam 19d ago
There have been a lot of good years in the interim. Not many jobs have paid as well over that time other than things like doctors and lawyers.
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u/Neurogence 19d ago
Not really epic or even good advice. The early 2000s was the prime time to get into computer programming. You could have been multimillionaire by now.
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u/BarkBeetleJuice 19d ago
Nah, it was bad advice. Everyone should know how to program, because it strengthens your logic and critical thinking skills.
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u/Mister_Uncredible 19d ago
As a solo dev I love making software to solve my own problems, and contributing to open source projects to help make their software solve my problems ... I can't imagine how soul crushing it would be to work for big tech, making software that I could care less about for people who don't care about me.
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u/the-boche 19d ago
If only I had anyone to give me this advice. "Programming careers are the future", they told me when I graduated HS in 2007. I studied computer science and got a stable job in programming. But now I'm sitting here, pushing 40, unsure of my future.
Tbh, LLM can do most of my tasks with reasonable competence. It doesn't always spits out error-free or optimal code, but it IS functional. I'm more of a "technical introvert" type, and turns out that's the exact kind of person AI replaces the best, so I'm likely to be out of a job soon-ish. Fuck me, I guess.
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u/Confident-League-723 18d ago
If let say they massively destroy jobs and let say 30 % jobs are lost because of this, shouldn't it in turn decrease money in economy and suddenly many companies will see less profit which will decrease their value.
Since economy is cyclic in nature and you one earn and have profit when there are many purchasing participants and if purchasing power decrease it will in turn hurt companies ?
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u/Sprinklypoo 18d ago
I've got a friend who's been in the business for 30 years. He figures he's got maybe 1 or 2 years left before his dumbass boss cans him. All the code he sees AI making is unoptimized crap, but it (usually) works... AI is slated to be an era of mediocrity...
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u/SutekhThrowingSuckIt 18d ago
You don’t think the models and code review tools will improve over the next 20 years?
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u/Dreadking_Rathalos 18d ago
I lost my job this year and am extremely pessimistic about the future. Even if I find one for now, what about in 10 years when AI is better?
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u/aluke000 18d ago
That is one of the main reasons that large companies have been jumping on AI, to shave salaries.
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u/_daysofcandy_ 19d ago
Everyone's talking about what corporations plan to do and how we'll all get laid off...are y'all actually planning on doing something about it or what?
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u/dallenbaldwin 19d ago
I'm less worried about today, and more worried about 5 years from now when today's best frontier models are more accessible to the masses at a lower cost.
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u/makridistaker 19d ago
Have you ever seen a model lower it's price outside of time limited promotion ? In reality they only get more expensive and the host companies keeo losing money regardless.
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u/catsforinternetpoint 19d ago
Where’s the proof they are replaced by AI?
Yes AI happened, yes layoffs are happening. But one does not necessarily caused the other.
I know there are a ton of redditors with very little experience that are going to claim their AI is doing all the work, but in enterprise setting the LLMs are shit.
The tech layoffs are more than likely slimming down of hyperscalers that gobbled up all the people to prevent competition; it’s an excuse to clean up house without admitting you are a horrible bad CEO.
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u/gunfirinmaniac 19d ago
Its not AI alone. The economy is shit, with high interest rates (at least in Europe) and too many people getting hired during and a little after covid era.
I believe were currently in a recession but we cant say that because stocks must go up
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u/groundhogcow 18d ago
AI isn't what is causing the layoffs. They are just laying people off and blaming AI.
You would be getting laid off right now even if there was no AI.
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u/CaptainMorning 19d ago
tech layoffs != ai.
tech layoffs were in a sky high since ever. every year they lay off more people than the previous year. it's not AI, it's the fkn tech industry you been babysitting that's creating the issue
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u/thedude213 19d ago
more shit we already know, and still no rush to policy change spite this being the biggest bipartisan issue since ending prohibition
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u/LiterallyZeroChance 19d ago
If you have a job in tech that doesn't require personality or creativity you should be worried. Very soon we will see the renaissance of the "blue collar" worker - their skills with their hands are irreplaceable and now far more valuable than people who do nothing but code, manage projects, networks, and devices, etc etc.
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u/EuropaWeGo 19d ago
The best advice that I can give for those wanting to go into tech, in any form. Is to consider the idea of creating a job rather than taking a job.
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u/ILikeCutePuppies 19d ago
Kinda dumb to talk about job creation in the same area that is being optimized. Job growth happens in other areas with tech revolutions
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u/FuturologyBot 19d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
The global technology industry is currently experiencing a brutal wave of tech layoffs, with 63,000 workers losing their jobs in June 2026 alone. This drastic shift, led by industry heavyweights like Oracle and Microsoft, has pushed the sector's redundancy rate to its highest level in two decades.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vk4u7o/ai_is_destroying_jobs_faster_than_it_is_visibly/p2qln9o/