Beyond displacing current workers, AI will lead to hiring "abatement," where companies proactively eliminate roles from their hiring plans altogether. This is a subtle but profound workforce shift, as entire job categories may vanish from the market before employees can be retrained.

An Indian company, Objectways, pays thousands of workers to wear headset cameras while performing manual tasks. This footage is sold as training data for humanoid robotics companies like Tesla's Optimus, effectively paying humans to accelerate their own obsolescence.

Companies are using AI hype as a justifiable narrative to cut headcount. These decisions are often driven by peer pressure and a desire to please shareholders, not by proven automation replacing specific tasks. AI has become a permission slip for layoffs that might have happened anyway.

Previously, data privacy concerns were abstract for most, leading only to worse ads. Now, giving AI companies unfettered access to your professional data provides them with the exact material needed to train models that will automate your job.

AI's potential for rapid growth is creating a new moral calculus. Practices like tracking every employee keystroke for CRM automation, once controversial, are becoming standard. This trend suggests that as companies chase exponential gains, they will increasingly justify and normalize actions, from mass layoffs to invasive monitoring, that were previously considered unacceptable.

AI is creating a grim feedback loop where displaced white-collar workers are finding employment in data annotation. In these roles, they are paid to train the very AI systems that eliminated their previous, higher-skilled careers, perpetuating the cycle of automation.

While proclaiming AI will create jobs, tech giants like Google and Meta have seen profits soar while their employee counts have fallen from 2022 peaks. This data from AI's biggest adopters provides concrete evidence that fuels public skepticism and fears of widespread, technology-driven job losses.

A dark trend emerging in China involves workers creating AI agents to automate their colleagues' jobs. The goal is to make others redundant first, thereby securing their own position in an increasingly competitive and automated workplace. This represents a strategic, albeit ruthless, application of personal AI.

When tech leaders like Jack Dorsey cite AI for layoffs, it may obscure a deeper motive: a relentless race for market dominance where societal impacts like job displacement and reskilling are deprioritized. The focus is on winning, with worker welfare often becoming collateral damage.