AI and Jobs

What happens to work when the machine does it: layoffs, solved professions, the labs, and the people still pretending their job is safe.

• 2026-11-05 — Less in the Way Specialized knowledge pays for a few more years, then depreciates to zero. What's left is adaptive intelligence that slows the machine least.
• 2026-10-16 — Another Day of Pretending The machine writes, reviews, deploys and sells, 24/7. Everyone is an end node, everyone knows, and they all show up to pretend they're needed.
• 2026-10-14 — Final Boss Soon there won't be apps, games or movies, just a hyperpersonalized stream generated in real time. Menu builders are restoring 1953 dashboards.
• 2026-10-02 — Tote Bag Tier Your $200 AI plan is the tote bag tier. The money funds a model that trains the next model, with fewer humans in the loop each quarter.
• 2026-10-01 — Job Simulator University isn't knowledge transfer. It's a job simulator for fake corporate jobs, the exact jobs AI deletes the year you graduate.
• 2026-10-01 — Fired Later Your AI applies, their AI rejects. You can name the layoffs but not one hire. Nobody is safe from AI job loss; some are just fired later.
• 2026-09-23 — Grabbing the Wheel Give the same AI to an illiterate, a genius and a midwit. The illiterate and the genius both beat the midwit, who grabs the wheel.
• 2026-07-26 — Out of Ideas For twenty years engineering was the bottleneck everyone hid behind. Now features ship in seconds and the real question is exposed.
• 2026-07-16 — AI Casino Corporations are turning into dinosaurs and the solopreneur with AI is next. But idea plus timing plus luck is a slot machine. The lab is the house.
• 2026-07-08 — No Hands A year ago: 'it hallucinates.' Now no one writes or reads code by hand. The profession ended in twelve months. It was never a faster horse.
• 2026-07-04 — How Much Stupider The dumber you are, the smarter the model you need to compensate. Eventually everyone is dumber than the models. The question is how much.
• 2026-07-02 — A Throat to Choke The one thing a human can do that AI can't is be held accountable: blamed, fired, made afraid. That's why the junior still gets hired.
• 2026-07-01 — No Moat A founder told his agent 'clone this site' and had the product by lunch. When building is free, the scarcity SaaS charged for collapses.
• 2026-07-01 — Idle Hands Governments fear idle hands above all: Weimar's 30% unemployment, 1789's bread prices. The 40-hour week is a control mechanism.
• 2026-06-28 — Possession In five to ten years frontier AI runs on home hardware and the state loses control of inference. So it does what it did with drugs.
• 2026-06-23 — Where Would You Like to Go The EV owner thinks he bought the future. He bought the bait: paying retail to train the robotaxi fleet that ends car ownership.
• 2026-06-15 — Toy Cars A founder with a GPT wrapper and four months of runway explains why AI risk is overblown, talking over people who spent decades on the problem.
• 2026-06-15 — Stampede The marketing guy shipped a trading system this morning. He can't read code, and the code is correct. Software development is over.
• 2026-06-11 — Token Owners GoFundMe campaigns for tokens. Thirty-year cognition mortgages. The old poverty starved the body; the new one rations intelligence.
• 2026-06-09 — Safe Choice You weren't into computers, but it was good money: four years, $200k of debt, zero passion. Then AI hit and the safe choice sank.
• 2026-05-05 — Bidding for Brains Right now AI is a bargain next to an employee. Once the labor is gone, the price of intelligence is set by whoever owns the compute.
• 2026-04-25 — Boxed The AI box experiment asked if a superintelligence could talk its way out. The real question turned out to be who ends up inside the box.
• 2026-04-22 — Last Mile EVs are a transitional species between the gas car and what's actually coming: autonomous fleets that nobody needs to own.
• 2026-04-17 — Hunger Games for Coders Hackathons are the new job interviews. Investments are the new jobs. Office jobs are gone. They just haven't been buried yet.
• 2026-03-08 — The Autonomous Corporation Fully automated startups: no employees, no office, no HR. Agents build and ship; humans become shareholders and the founder a wallet address.
• 2026-02-28 — The Bandwidth Problem Orchestrating multi-agent systems won't be a lasting competitive edge. Even if it works, the advantage lasts until the next model ships.
• 2026-02-22 — Zero-Dollar Layer The true sign of intelligence isn't syntax, credentials or interviews. It's getting what you want, and AI just made the bottom layer free.
• 2026-02-14 — The New Mainframe AI raises the bar for everyone while the rewards flow upward to the same place they always have. Automate yourself and you get a bigger quota.
• 2026-02-02 — Solo Billionaire The future isn't teams. It's one person and a network of agents, and the first solo billion-dollar company is a matter of when.
• 2026-01-08 — Vertical Collapse Frontend, backend, DevOps: org-chart artifacts from when software needed armies. AI collapses the whole stack into one person and an agent.
• 2025-12-11 — The Luxury of Coding Manual coding built the whole digital world until 2024. It's still possible, just prohibitively slow: a luxury hobby, not a job.
• 2025-11-09 — The AI Compressor The internet made information free and didn't make people smarter. AI won't democratize intelligence either. It widens the gap.
• 2025-10-31 — Post-Labor Endgame What corporations become once human labor stops mattering: hive-minded, extractive, hungry for outside validation. And where that leaves you.
• 2025-10-31 — Midwit Denial Most white-collar workers are in structural denial about AI, because their identity, status and income all depend on not seeing it coming.
• 2025-08-20 — AI's Near-Future Impact For a century the sharpest 10% slipped the leash of school, corporate catechism and propaganda. AI changes who gets out, and how fast.

Other topics: Corporate Life · Money and Ownership · School and Conditioning · Agency and the Midwit · Power and Control

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