The approaching mass AI layoffs

Daily Life, Swiss News and General Topics
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Who’s up for a bit of paranoia today? I agree with the trends the writer is describing, but too much drama. The link to the opinion piece:

So, let’s begin. Indeed, plenty of people in the office works on performance assessments, invoiceable hours, net margin, etc. Heck, these costs are properly classified as overhead costs.

How many roles essentially consist of processing information and then presenting it to someone to make a decision? Now not only the process and report will be automated, but perhaps the decision as well. This will result in the great disemboweling of white-collar jobs.

I’m not worried about this because it’s true, but because there’s indeed the hazard that the “stock market” will reward AI adoption measured in fired employees. The balance sheet will look great for a few quarters. Next, there might be a correction, but 1, 2 or more years without a job is a high price for corporate trial & error.

This automation wave will kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12 - 18 months. As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t. As one investor put it, “Sell anything that consists of people sitting at a desk looking at a computer.”

I like the name, seems appropriate.

I’ve started to call this displacement wave the Fuckening because that feels more visceral.

I don’t think the 20-50% decrease in employment the writer mentions will materialize. But, unemployment going up 2% is enough disruption.

Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves. Right now, there are about 70 million white-collar workers in the United States. Expect that number to be reduced substantially, by 20 – 50% in the next several years. Even a reduction of several million would be tectonic, and I fully expect it to go well beyond that level.

The opinion piece is centered in the US. There’s something which can be a couple of sneezes in the US but become a pneumonia in Switzerland. People trust the system here. And I spent some years in the university and the Swiss were a minority. Why? Because graduate education is a serious hit to your career income. Why spend years at the university earning less than an immigrant plastering gypsum in wall when you can earn the average or above with your business related EFZ/CFC? I guess this is the highest hazard from AI for Switzerland: people who think that they deserve better because they have always done what they’ve been told to do in life. And it only needs to be a minor increase in unemployment.

The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens…People are not going to take it well. Particularly educated people who think that they deserve better. That’s an ingredient for revolt.

Hopefully, the discontent will just be an increase in bitter middle-aged readers who believe they’re not valued enough at insideparadeplatz.ch or reddit/Switzerland. Honestly, I guess it will be higher distrust at whatever looks like foreign/immigrant. So, the Fuckening is a good name for this.

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I think this is a question that we will have to tackle. I think the one thing that might help is inertia. It takes a few years for companies to adopt technology and integrate it. And a few years for AI to get better, so there’s some transition time.

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This gave me the shivers a week or so back…

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn’t just better than the last… it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

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I have a similar experience. I finish many evenings now leaving a job for the AI before I go to bed. And in the morning, I go to check on the results and usually the job is done.

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Thanks for the thread split. I was derailing the other one :slight_smile:

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Wonder if all of that was written by AI.

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Haha! Very meta…

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What no one seems to consider - at least those who can do something about it - is that people put out of work will still need money to be able to buy things. If AI is going to be doing all these jobs then the companies running those AI’s should give a % of their profits into a fund which will pay those now redundant workers an effective wage. Or else you bring in a universal salary for everyone funded by said AI profits.

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When so many are unemployed then who will be left to buy the products or services those companies offer?
Those who remain employed will likely hoard their money for fear of joining their unemployed neighbours.

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[quote=“MedeaFleecestealer, post:8, topic:143447, full:true”]
What no one seems to consider - at least those who can do something about it - is that people put out of work will still need money to be able to buy things. [/quote]

This is the question that troubles me. I don’t think there is a clear answer. But we’ve seen that companies will push for profits and so may be it ends up as a giant social experiment.

We can’t even get tech companies to stop tax avoidance and pay their tax let alone get them to donate money. Trump is blocking and threatening retaliation on global tax avoidance measures and digital taxes seeking to tax Big Tech.

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Plumbers and electricians

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I had the thoughts over a decade ago that the software industry is a big scam. Products which doesn’t really bring any new value, but why not creating another clone of X and pitch how much it’s better… silly model which was keeping a large % of working population employed. Now with the AI we’re going to an end of this “useless jobs/nonsense software evolution” industry. Perhaps we’ll see even more competition on the market for everything, but these competing products will be made by a handful of people each. Of course not all software made out there is on this useless-competition category, there are genuinely well made products which don’t have any serious competition, these will survive and will continue employ good developers.

Summarization, data transformation or visualization, is indeed another threat. Again, I don’t believe in the long term quality of the summaries, but instead of having 10 people you’d get 5 or 2 using AI.

I really wonder what will fill the void of jobs shortage so quickly, otherwise our “developed western civilization” will collapse. People can’t be left without hope, opportunities, especially young. Crime will develop faster than AI stock price

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Good point. Excel and Word are basically the same as 20 years ago. The zip file containing XMLs.

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It’s started… albeit small and cautious, but it’s started.

I work in consultancy, and already have two projects where the client has asked “how can we make our team more efficient by leveraging AI for more junior roles?”

Where 10 years ago we offshored or nearshored, now we look towards technology. Somehow, I feel like the lower-cost countries will be particularly impacted by this.

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I am old enough to have been around when computers arrived and there were the same doom and gloom forecasts but there was little actual change.

Maybe this time will be different but I have my doubts.

Good point about the lower cost countries

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I think the main challenge this time maybe the speed and breadth of disruption. But that depends wholly on how quickly AI improves and how fast companies are able to adopt it.

One optimistic view is that AI might actually spur a lot of stuff to happen that would not have happened before, i.e. it creates new activity rather than only displacing existing jobs.

Most of the stuff I use AI for are things I would not have done before as it would have been too expensive/slow.

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Yes I recall the introduction of computer tools to do what had been manually done previously. I recall, working in the accounting department of an airline filing each flight coupon of a ticket behind the audit coupon so the revenues could be reconciled. Automation obviated that need as you could just get a print-out of a tickets history. I don’t recall it impacting on jobs just that we could do more with the same staff and that we could keep up with growth in the business. Some jobs simply disappear but new ones were created.

If that’s the case with AI, that would be a very good thing. If not …

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With computers, it was a mixture of the two:

Loads of new jobs were created as new industries sprung up - computer gaming, online retail, internet based industries.

Mobile phone manufacture and services is another new industry.

Jobs were also lost as computer-based machines replaced manual workers.
Switzerland used to be the place to go for precision engineering - CPU test sockets was one thing I remember buying from here - at a shocking price.
Now machines make these in China at a fraction of the cost.

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Microsoft AI CEO Warns Most White Collar Jobs Fully Automated “Within Next 12-18 Months”
“I think we’re going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks - so white collar where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer, accountant, or project manager, or marketing person - most of the tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months,” Suleyman said when asked about the time table for Artificial general intelligence, commonly known as AGI.

A recent Challenger report showed that AI was blamed for 7,624 job cuts in January, 7% of the month’s total, and linked to 54,836 announced layoffs across 2025. Since tracking started in 2023, AI has been cited in 79,449 planned cuts, roughly 3% of the overall tally.

A stark illustration is unfolding at Bay Area startup Mercor, which has quietly hired tens of thousands of white-collar contractors, often highly credentialed specialists in medicine, law, finance, engineering, writing, and the arts, to train the very AI systems destined to replace them. Paid $45 to $250 per hour for weeks or months of reviewing and refining model outputs for giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, these workers are, in effect, being paid to hand over the keys to their own obsolescence, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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Well he would say that wouldn’t he.

Lawyers using AI has not been a great success

"Several lawyers in the United States and internationally have been sanctioned, fined, and reprimanded for submitting legal briefs containing fake case citations and fabricated precedents generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT. These incidents have prompted courts to emphasize that while AI tools can be used for assistance, lawyers have a mandatory duty to independently verify the accuracy of all submissions.

  • Mata v. Avianca (New York, 2023): This landmark case involved two lawyers who submitted a brief with fake, AI-generated case law. The judge fined the lawyers $5,000 for acting in bad faith, noting they “consciously avoided” discovering that the citations were hallucinations.
  • California Law Firm Sanctions (2025): Two prominent law firms (K&L Gates LLP and Ellis George LLP) were sanctioned a total of $31,100 by a federal special master in Los Angeles for submitting a brief that included fabricated quotes and non-existent cases generated by AI.

&&&