Amazon is laying off 14,000 corporate employees with the potential for another 30,000 cuts next year. Early reports suggested the job slashing was part of a pivot to artificial intelligence — the long-expected strategy of replacing costly human labor, with its demands for weekends off, decent pay, and health insurance, with machines that ask for none of this and never bother to question the boss. Amazon has since said the cuts are not in the service of moving to AI but rather a matter of “culture” — keeping the behemoth “Everything Company” lean.

And I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Slightly used, but iconic.

For years, the klaxons have been sounding a warning that AI in its various iterations and conceptions would displace labor — which is to say, gut jobs and lower the bargaining power and political capacity of workers. At first, the focus of concern was on blue-collar jobs, with AI expected to automate manufacturing processes. It was not a new notion — machines have been replacing workers for decades — but a transformation at scale that would take on a quality all its own. More recently, AI presented as a threat to white-collar jobs too, including accountants, lawyers, bankers, and other professionals who, the story goes, might be replaced with a clever large language model or robotic process automation. Suddenly no one was safe.