The Supposed AI “Bloodbath”

In the spring, Axios called the shift a “white-collar bloodbath,” citing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who warned that AI adoption could lead to unemployment rates as high as 20 percent, hitting entry-level jobs particularly hard and potentially eliminating half of them. Amodei warned that policymakers didn’t grasp the level of the coming changes, or the strange dynamics they would bring.

“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced — and 20 percent of people don’t have jobs,” he told Axios journalists Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. In another world, one might imagine a worker utopia emerging from mass automation. That would be another world indeed.

At the time, as Axios noted, Microsoft had laid off 6,000 engineers and Walmart had cut 1,500 corporate jobs. Now CBS News is reporting that the “no hire, no fire” economic standstill of recent days may be yielding to “fire at will.” The combination of a softening economy and Trump’s reckless economic brinkmanship is incentivizing companies to cut back and to automate whatever might conceivably be automated. The job cuts include Amazon, which claimed last summer that AI would lead to workforce reductions. Other companies slashing jobs include the United Parcel Service (UPS), Paramount Skydance, and Target.

There may still be a taboo around gutting jobs and replacing them with machines, but if there is, it won’t last for long at the rate things are going. Perhaps the corporate leaders who are safe from redundancy, for the moment, are trying to strike a balance between “investment” in efficiency — which is to say crushing labor — and avoiding mass panic as they hollow out the consumer class they rely on to buy their products. But the writing is on the wall in bold-font ones and zeros. The industrial strategy of replacing any employee who might be conceivably replaceable with a machine may fail, but that won’t stop business heads from trying.

The Bubble and the Resistance

AI companies might be overvalued, and we may be in an AI-induced bubble, with Silicon Valley darlings trading briefcases of cash back and forth among each other. But the tech oligarchs are all in on a dystopian, AI-driven, workerless future. They have the capital and political influence to wage the battle for a long, long time. The irony of the situation is that even if the bubble does pop, the biggest players in the industry will be deemed too big to fail, like many of the banks and lending houses during the global finance crisis of 2008.

You might think an economic crash induced by an AI gold rush would finally shatter the notion that AI is the inevitable path on which we must trod — and it might. But there’s a risk that without pushback, the collapse will actually suppress labor power and invite more automation and industrial consolidation, further entrenching American and global oligarchy — or what increasingly resembles techno-feudalism. What we have here is less of an economy than a casino, one in which the house, the big corporate players, can’t lose. Heads they win, tails you lose, and, either way you’d better behave yourself and not ask for too much, or else the robot is coming for your job. But, postscript: it may come for your job either way.

And what are you going to do about it?

Stand Up, Fight Back

The worst thing workers can do is accept a fate ordained by the tech gods atop Olympus. AI may consist of a series of technologies, some of which are genuinely useful tools that are here to stay — but the mass displacement of labor without any industrial plan to absorb the transformation is not inevitable. A democratization of AI control could put the technologies to work for communities in the same way the democratization of workplaces could put industry to work for communities.

Achieving socialized control of workplaces and technologies, including AI, will require organizing work both inside and outside of electoral politics. Mass movement politics means bodies in the streets, workers willing to strike and stand in solidarity with their coworkers across industries, and organizations holding elected officials to account, even those — perhaps especially those — on their side. Successful movements also require an electoral point of input, someone who can write regulations and pass bills and transform the energies and demands of those who take part in movement politics into codified outcomes at scale. Indeed, regulations are central to any solution for the upheaval caused by companies deploying AI. Economic decisions are often political decisions too. In a democracy, it’s entirely reasonable to expect companies to owe something to not just their workers but the broader community too.

In the first decade of this century, both the anti–Wall Street 99 percent movement and the Tea Party reshaped American politics. The right-wing insurgents were arguably more successful at channeling mass anger into electoral power, but the rise of figures including Bernie Sanders — long a fixture in Congress but newly national after 2008 — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, flawed as each may be, is a reminder that the Left can win too. Even Zohran Mamdani, likely the next mayor of New York, is a legacy of those heady days of righteous anger and resistance.

The Left can organize, and the Left can win. As the old union saying goes, division is a tool of the boss. So is hopelessness. As grim as the news of AI-induced layoffs may be, as unsettling as reports of a future dominated by tech oligarchs in which powerless workers cower, the future isn’t written yet. We can choose to write it ourselves, without the machines or, rather, with machines working for — and controlled by — us.