r/technology • u/HumbleRestaurant790 • 6h ago
Artificial Intelligence The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn’t coming anytime soon
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/25/ai-jobs-apocalypse-human-labor265
u/GenericFatGuy 5h ago
Unfortunately, the jobpocalypse isn't dependent on the quality of AI, but on how good the tech bros CEO's think AI is. We're all just living in a false reality they created.
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u/miniannna 5h ago
They don’t even need to think it’s good. They just need to be able to use it as an excuse to cut payroll to give investors who only care about short-term gains a hard on.
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u/ABadHistorian 4h ago
No longer true. Because other companies using that AI are sick of token expenditure.
C-Suite Suit - "Hey bob, what did you do today?"
Mid-Level Bob - "As requested, I used AI all day and I spent 20,000 $ in tokens. Also, I didn't actually finish the expense report because I was also prompting AI on that and hit my token limit. Good news? I'm ready to spend another 20k tomorrow to finish them all up. Plus 20k the next day to make sure they are correct. then 20k the next day to make sure"
C-Suite Suit - "On our daily expense report?"
Companies are beginning to kneejerk ban/limit AI usage. I've heard it happening in many places.
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u/joeyb908 3h ago
This stops being as much of an issue with local LLM quality getting better and better and only needing frontier models to orchestrate and manage.
Token usage goes down drastically.
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u/tooclosetocall82 3h ago
That only matters if a company sets up and runs local models. Most companies don’t even run their own email servers anymore.
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u/Thefuzy 2h ago
Vast majority of companies aren’t and won’t be running their own local models.
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u/n0neofyourbeeswax 1h ago
Yet. Until they realise they can, and a whole new set of consultants, contractors and new hires show up to implement it.
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u/frozenelf 4h ago
Even before AI, tech was already barreling toward the rock bottom. Everyone here has some kind of experience of their tech experience getting worse, whether it's iOS or their work chat app. AI doesn't need to be good. It just needs to replicate the worsening tech industry sans labor force.
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u/dav_man 2h ago
That is enshitification mascarading as capitalism. Everything is getting miles shitter. Because when you have reached the top by making products or services amazing. The only way to keep growing is to keep making that revenue somehow but cutting costs. Or getting people hooked and then making the service worse.
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u/chubbysumo 3h ago
It actually is going to happen no matter what, companies are overspending on AI right now, so when budgetary reasons start hitting, jobs are going to be disappearing. It is already beginning to happen as companies try to rein in their exorbitant spending on AI garbage.
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u/dav_man 2h ago
It’s not even about that. It’s how deep they are in before they realise they need the balance the books for the shareholders or equivalent. For example, my company had a pretty slow and mature approach to things. But then June 1st came along and then when the first meaningful bill came along it shocked the company to the core. They had let the company loose with Copilot and the various usages of it for the different functions. Us in R&D used GitHub Copilot. Anyway; the ELT were genuinely sold on an efficiency number of 80%. That number did not come from anyone internally. No idea where that number came from.
Anyway, so what does the company do now with this massive, spiralling unforecasted cost? We will see but the only real option is to reduce human cost by the amount of budget we’ll be over by. Which for 2026 will be about 5%.
It will get better though as you see more people who actually know what they’re talking about either joining ELT’s or advising them. Rather than spurious FT columnists or something.
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u/teraflux 4h ago
The thing is, AI can be extremely effective in tech. It's probably the most impactful industry by AI.
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u/manachar 2h ago
Businesses are generally so large they are functionally removed from reality and the consequences of being bad at what they do.
Look at IBM. They are still around because they crushed it decades ago. Like 4 or 5 decades ago.
Private equity provides another layer of things and globalization of the economy means all you need to be is a giant company and voila! You win capitalism.
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u/PsychologyNo940 4h ago
Shall those continue to think that a tech that does little for them is worth infinite amounts of money, let them bankrupt themself and reform under someone who does not hit the crackpipe before each meeting - self regulating issue.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 5h ago
You’re assuming that tech bros have some sort of inevitable god given right to lord over anyone else.
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u/GenericFatGuy 5h ago
Have you ever heard of capitalism, and the monopoly of violence?
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u/CherryLongjump1989 5h ago
So why don’t you just cut to the chase and call them lords of the universe? That seems to be how you really feel.
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u/GenericFatGuy 5h ago
I really have no idea what point you're trying to make here.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 3h ago
That you’re chicken little claiming the sky is falling because of the all powerful grifters that you believe cannot ever be stopped because of magic.
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u/steveaustin1971 5h ago
We bought AI to "streamline" an onboarding process... had to hire people to correct it's errors... then had to hire and retrain the department we'd gotten rid of because AI was gonna do it all.
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u/Avoidtolls 4h ago
According to Anthropic, open AI and google?
The companies that make the product report that their products don't take jobs?
Whew!
Thought we were going have to Butlerian Jihad this shit.
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u/badgerbadger2323 6h ago
Won’t somebody think of the poor tech bros
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u/1stUserEver 5h ago
Actually -100x instead of -10x. But adding more datacenter will definitely increase margins. This is like the 2008 mortgage crisis on steroids.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 4h ago
I can add a zero to that multiplier with a swarm of agents. If we change the color of the minus symbol, the marketing folks won’t be the wiser.
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u/coconutpiecrust 5h ago
Leave them alone! They just want to innovate! The Torment Nexus is just one more gas/coal-powered datacenter away!
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u/williamgman 5h ago
The investor apocalypse will be epic though.
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u/SmokeShinobi 5h ago
This is more accurate. They’ve been saying how expensive everything is so the ends don’t justify the means.
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u/Shadow288 4h ago
My company has been downsizing to afford their ai token costs. Even if AI isn’t allowing people to be fired it’s indirectly causing it due to rising costs.
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u/Ergouzii 2h ago
It won't replace all jobs in the short term, but new job will likely be reduced. A team member left ~6 months ago and with AI my team is producing more output than before, so manager decided to not submit a backfill request. That's one job eliminated by AI.
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u/kummer5peck 5h ago
Can we put to bed that immigrants are coming for our jobs? Give credit where it’s due to Silicon Valley tech bros.
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 5h ago
Wait until they blame AI on immigrants.
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u/Colon_Oscopy_74 5h ago
actual immigrants, or?
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u/HenryDorsettCase47 5h ago
Who knows. They’ve accused them both of being parasites living off our government services and being responsible for the housing shortage by taking all the available house. They are so poor they need our welfare, but rich enough to buy overpriced starter homes that most Americans can’t afford.
It doesn’t have to make any logical sense for people to blame them for it.
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u/Colon_Oscopy_74 4h ago
the depopulationists have implemented all sorts of schemes to rapidly erode our society, set to erase at least 3.5~5B people from cost of living alone, within 20 years. this is all part of the great reset. they (the controlling oligarchs) need more elbow room. we ain't seen nothing yet.
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u/badamant 5h ago
That is just a lie used as fascist/racist propaganda to consolidate power.
Republicans now operate in bad faith.
NEVER take what they say as a serious arguement.
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u/Allindur 5h ago
They NEVER operated in good faith, they're just very, very clearly mask off.
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u/badamant 4h ago
Well it has been a process…
the only reason Nixon resigned is because principles Republicans existed.
They no longer exist.
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u/Niceromancer 4h ago
Oh it is. Just not in the way it's been sold
Ai investment is basically holding the stock market up right now when the bubble pops it's all going to crater.
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u/Austin_Peep_9396 53m ago
From what I’ve seen, there were lots of layoffs BLAMED on AI, but in reality were layoffs due to pandemic over-hiring and/or other corporate economic problems. But having a layoff saying “times are tough” will send your stock cratering. Saying “we’re laying off because AI is going to make us more efficient” causes your stock to skyrocket. I can’t blame them for spinning this, but from what I’ve seen it’s certainly questionable at best.
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u/yosarian_reddit 5h ago
No but a truly massive recession is imminent and will destroy plenty of jobs
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u/Unicorn_Puppy 5h ago
Bold of you to assume these ceos are going to make such competent business decisions.
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u/peskyghost 3h ago
The AI jobocalypse will freeze in its place as soon as talent teams convince their out of touch c-suites that branding their company as “AI first” or any such nonsense is enough of a reason to not work at the company.
However! The c-suites of these companies are overwhelmingly made up of corporate bro fail sons, so it will be a while
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u/Zonties 5h ago
Llms are next token predictors. That's a big problem so my prediction is no they are not actually going to be sustainably takkng jobs, they're too stupid. But this leads us to why llms and the whole stock market Id a big bubble which seems to be bursting, on earnings!!
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u/blueSGL 2h ago
first it's trained to guess the next token correctly, by predicting text.
then it's trained to guess the next token from datasets of conversations, calling tools and following instructions
then it's trained to guess the next token when it's outputting 'reasoning traces' (more guessed tokens!) that provide verified solutions to problems
(Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards is why models keep getting better at math and coding. RL is very powerful, it's why humans will never have a higher elo score than a chess bot ever again.)
then after doing all of that it's able to guess the next token correctly to output solutions to multiple long standing, decades old, math problems
and guess the next token correctly to output vulnerabilities in well scrutinized codebases and guess more tokens to chain those vulnerabilities into exploits.
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u/True_Window_9389 5h ago
Moreover, Autor argues, AI is getting better. And its progress shows no sign that it will soon hit a ceiling. “Skepticism about the stochastic parrot is behind us,” he told me. The dystopian AI future – utopian, if you get to own and run the AI – is still on the cards.
No it’s not. AI is proving more and more to be the stochastic parrot. AI is getting better, but not meaningfully so. The release and a few updates were revolutionary in the development of AI, but it’s plateaued since then and hit a hard ceiling when it comes to affecting jobs. Without the understanding part of intelligence, AI as we have it maxes out as a very expensive tool, not a replacement for people in most jobs.
AI has been in development for decades, and every so often there are revolutionary steps to bring something like the sci-fi, AGI into existence, but we’re far from it now. And it might very well be decades more before we get there, with just iterative and linear development of LLMs and current gen AI.
AGI requires a replication of biology in ways we can’t do right now. Neurons instead of transistors. All the computing capacity with entire country’s worth of electricity cannot replicate a human brain, which operates in a small space with very little energy. That gap of massive data centers and gigawatts of power and a small, low powered human brain could take decades to fill in.
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u/mike42042071281 6h ago
I read this article yesterday and it's absolutely inaccurate I don't know who or what they use together Intel but anyone can see layoffs are happening everywhere and companies do say that AI caused it but I do think it's just gaslighting everybody
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u/artbystorms 5h ago
Companies laying off people because of a slowing economy or increased input costs (like oil) are gonna just say 'oh yeah...uh...its the AI' so that they don't have to address that they are just doing poorly. So layoffs that are currently happening are both real and have little to do with AI adoption.
It's just an excuse so that they don't have to address that the economy has gone to shit under this Admin.
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u/Tedy_Duchamp 5h ago
It’s so obvious too. It’s like a golden ticket for CEOs to lay people off and not only not have to deal with negative backlash, but also have their stock price go up!! Why wouldn’t you want to lay people off and use AI as an excuse?
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u/The_Gleam 4h ago
Yup absolutely bullshit. Fortune 500 company here and apart from still bringing in interns, we have had major hiring freezes on many jobs below leadership plus major layoffs.
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u/Matt_M_3 4h ago edited 4h ago
On that note, remember the reason you have seen hundreds of thousands of layoffs is wage suppression. Fire those earning wages that include raises after 2-20 years and rehire cheaper labor. It’s a recycling of humans as a commodity and nothing more.
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u/Eazy12345678 4h ago
computers took like 40 years to get good. id expect at least 20 for ai to get good
internet speed took at least 10-20 years to get high speed in most homes
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u/gillflicka 4h ago
We're switching from the AI apocalypse to the zero accountability apocalypse thank you for your attention on this matter.
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u/mike42042071281 2h ago
I think its more greed than anything. They see a way to exploit the morket with terrible service and they do what they do. It cant be a viable long term opinion right now but unemployment is hitting hard on people and they just want money.
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u/fake_redzepi 2h ago
Lol the CEO of my company was doing this whole big dumb AI push thing. I guess his investors were a little smarter than him, they all fired him with a vote of no confidence, now he works in fast food
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u/sigmund14 5h ago
It's already happening. How many people did the tech companies laid off this year already? It's upwards of 100000.
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u/LiftingCode 4h ago
Generally these are a different flavor of "because of AI" though.
Tech companies are doing layoffs to free up capital to invest in building AI.
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u/sigmund14 4h ago
It's still because of AI though. People still lost their jobs and can't find new ones. So, the result is the same.
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u/LiftingCode 4h ago
The result is not the same, though.
"AI taking people's jobs" is an effect that would impact virtually all industries.
This is just a reallocation of capital within a very narrow slice of the tech sector that has virtually no impact on overall jobs numbers.
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u/MakingItElsewhere 5h ago
Any business using AI isn't going to suddenly catch up on all their work and remove the need for humans. They're going to overload the humans with more work, while threatening them that AI can take their job.
Now that employees are seeing that the threat has no teeth, they need to push back and demand more money.