Jack Dorsey just fired half his company. Ten thousand people at Block. Cut to six thousand. Overnight.
His reason? AI made the rest unnecessary.
And if you think your job is different, ninety-four percent of managers already use AI to decide who stays and who goes.
You just haven't been told yet.
Forty-five thousand tech workers lost their jobs in March alone. Nine thousand two hundred of them were told the same thing.
AI can do it cheaper.
But here's what nobody's talking about.
Harvard Business Review looked at the data. These companies aren't firing people because AI works. They're firing people because AI might work. Someday. Eventually. Probably.
Not performance. Potential.
They're not replacing you with a machine. They're replacing you with a press release.
Chegg fired forty-five percent of its workforce. Said it was the "new realities of AI."
Their stock dropped ninety-nine percent in two years.
Dow cut four thousand five hundred jobs. Said AI and automation made them redundant.
Their profit margins haven't changed.
Fiverr laid off thirty percent. Called it an "AI-first mindset."
The AI they're putting first? It doesn't exist yet.
But that's the wrong question.
Everyone's asking: "Will AI take my job?"
Wrong.
The question is: "Did your boss already use AI to decide you're expendable?"
Because that's what's actually happening.
Ninety-four percent of managers. Using AI tools to determine promotions. Raises. Terminations.
One in three of those managers? No formal training in how AI works. No understanding of what the model is actually measuring. No idea what biases are baked into the system that just ranked their team.
They're not using AI as a tool.
They're using AI as a shield.
"The algorithm said so" is the new "nothing personal."
And here's the part that should make you furious.
Fifty-five percent of the leaders who did AI layoffs admit they made the wrong call. More than half. They fired people they needed. Lost institutional knowledge they can't rebuild. Broke teams that were working.
And what did they do next?
Rehired. Quietly. Offshore. At a fraction of the salary.
Not because AI replaced the work. Because AI replaced the excuse.
Oxford Economics calls it "corporate fiction masking a darker reality."
The reality is simple. Companies overhired during the pandemic. They need to cut. But "we overhired" is a bad headline. "AI transformation" is a good one.
So your job didn't get automated.
It got rebranded.
One in three companies say entry-level roles will be gone by December. Not because AI can do the work. Because AI gave them permission to stop pretending they valued training the next generation.
The entry-level job was never efficient. It was an investment. A bet that a twenty-two-year-old with no experience would become someone worth keeping.
AI didn't eliminate that bet.
It eliminated the patience.
So I asked AI to fire me.
And it said yes.
Not because I'm bad at my job. Not because a language model can replace what I do. But because the spreadsheet says I cost more than the projected savings of a tool that hasn't shipped yet.
That's the math now.
You versus a forecast. A pitch deck. A quarterly earnings call where the CEO says "AI-first" and the stock ticks up two percent.
You were never competing with a machine.
You were competing with a PowerPoint slide.
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I'll be here, watching the singularity, until there's nothing left to watch.