As the months go by without a single job offer despite the hundreds of resumes and applications I’ve submitted, and as my life savings continues to dwindle away to nothing, I keep finding myself seeking out the stories of other people who are also stuck in the long-term unemployment doom loop. There of course is a part of me that is comforted in a small way knowing that the challenges I have been facing over the last 13 months and counting are not just a result of me being defective or something, but more than that, reading about other people’s struggles is helping to paint a wider picture of the systemic issues we currently face. Story after story, it always seems to come back in one way or another to the push from the powerful to integrate AI into every facet of human life, and the fallout thereof.

It doesn’t seem to matter what industry you’re in, there’s a chance AI is coming for your job. Artists, cashiers, software engineers, customer service representatives, fitness instructors (yes, even fitness instructors), there is no job that is truly safe from some CEO out there trying to outsource it to a robot or a computer instead of paying a person to do it.

From the perspective that corporations are, above all else, beholden to increase shareholder value as much as is physically possible, the prospect of potentially permanently removing the cost of labor must sound enticing. That’s the C-suite’s wet dream, really: a labor force they don’t have to pay or provide benefits, which they can abuse with impunity, and which will respond to each of their brainless ideas with the obsequiousness and undue praise they’ve grown to expect from everyone after surrounding themselves with nothing but sycophants. So of course the various CEOs and executives latched onto the promises each of the tech broligarchs have made to them to that end.

Why employ dozens to maybe even hundreds of call center employees to handle customer service calls for your business when you could implement an ineffectual AI phone tree? While you’re at it, why not replace your chat and email customer service reps with a complementary ineffectual chat and email bot? All three are bundled together for even more corporate savings! It doesn’t matter that your customers can’t resolve their problems.

No need to worry about paying costly development and QA teams anymore, just have one person vibe-code everything! Who cares if it adds mountains of needless and nonsensical complexity, tech debt, and spaghetti code when you never intend to have another human being touch it ever again? The AI agent will simply mark all the tests it made up results for as ‘Passed’, so you’ll never know the difference, just sweet green checkboxes on a printout full of lies while your customers deal with buggy, broken software. That doesn’t matter, though, your customers will just have to deal with it.

Trying to quickly look something up on Google? The AI Overview at the top of your results might contain synopsis of completely fabricated data for you! Don’t worry about writing that email, have Copilot compose it for you. Too busy playing on your phone to take meeting notes? Don’t worry, Teams will try and fail to summarize it for you. Hell, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, you can and should even outsource raising your infant child to an LLM chatbot.

The examples of AI infesting every day life go on and on and on (seriously, they’ve even shoved Copilot into the Notepad app). And while it might not be obvious how each of these examples is impacting the landscape of the job market, it becomes easier to connect the dots if you look at it after taking a few steps back.

You see, the tech broligarchs, and indeed their counterparts in essentially every other industry, look at us plebian non-billionaires like NPCs, or non-playable characters like in a video game. I will not be linking to X the Everything-Including-CSAM-Generating App, but if you feel so inclined, you can find posts and replies from Elon Musk and others saying exactly that, speaking both generally and to individual people. This view that basically everyone except themselves and possibly a choice few other people are NPCs enables and extends their worldview that not only do our lives not matter, but that basic concepts like the value of thinking and creating art and countless other endeavors are also valueless unless it in some way generates a profit for them (and even then, they probably could still be convinced that those things have no inherent value).

It is this disdain for the rest of humanity and for the things that make us human, like art, expression, and connection with each other, that drives the current movement we are watching unfold. The powerful devalue these things because of how they abhor their benefits for the people they see as their lessers, namely people like you and me, without also lining their coffers as much as they would like. They do not understand and do not care that, for instance, writing is a way not only to express oneself, but it also is an incredibly effective way to engage in critical thinking as you compose your thoughts on the page. Instead, they view tasks like writing and even thinking as a waste of time, especially for those of us who are supposedly less than. Not to mention that they don’t want the masses to engage in things like reading or critical thinking, because then we might think a little too hard about who it is exactly that is oppressing us and the various ways in which they are doing so.

Using the influx of AI in the workplace in tech as an example, most CEOs have exactly zero concept of what it is their employees actually do and why those things have value. When faced with a side-by-side of a developer and QA team shipping a feature versus an AI agent writing what is intended to be the same feature, the CEO’s eyes glaze over everything except for how fast the AI agent spat out its initial code. This does not take into account how long the person prompting the AI agent has to optimize and fine tune their prompts, how much time they must spend debugging the probably-junk that the agent returned, and the inevitable hallucinations they are bound to encounter. It is the act of thinking about what you’re writing when you write code (or indeed, when you write anything) that leads to a more thoughtful (ha) and better end product, and that is explicitly not possible for an AI agent to do since LLMs are literally incapable of thinking. When all is said and done, the developer and QA team might look on paper like they spent more time (and therefore more money) to deliver the requested feature, but the human generated content will almost invariably be more reliable over time, be shipped with fewer defects, and have less unnecessary complexity, which matters when it comes to maintaining the product in question.

So in every industry imaginable you have potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of people being laid off because their now-former employer’s CEOs were promised that they could replace a significant portion of their workforce with AI agents of some kind or another. This issue is then compounded by the utter lack of understanding or valuation of the work by the people making these decisions, in part because they will not see the necessity in reversing said decisions when AI proves itself not to be the workforce-reducing silver bullet they were promised. They do not seem to understand or care that while AI agents can sometimes help increase efficiency for certain tasks, you often already need to be a master in your respective role AND be skilled at prompting in order to even somewhat effectively leverage any gains from it.

In the past, it could generally be counted on that when a new technology made sweeping changes to the employment landscape, displaced workers would eventually at least have the opportunity to be swept up in different roles or fields as things evolved, sometimes with entirely new industries being formed to replace what had become obsolete. Right now, it’s still relatively early in the movement to replace many of our jobs with AI, but the movement is accelerating, and the creation of new jobs is not keeping pace with the demand. I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic, but the prospects are pretty grim. There are roles out there to train AI in various industries, but you’re just exacerbating the problem and are quite literally training your replacement. The number of available roles to direct and maintain AI agents will simply not be enough to replace the millions of jobs that have been lost in the last year alone. And that’s not to even begin to speak about the other issues people are having when trying to find work that I wrote about in my post Being Unemployed in 2026: Searching for a Job in Hell.

I once again do not know what we’re supposed to do about this. The best I personally can do right now is to try to make the people around me aware as I continue to try to tread water while also watching my savings disappear. It sucks knowing there are literally millions of other people out there who are also struggling to tread water in this mess. But we need to try to do something, because this trend is not sustainable.