Amazon made $35 billion in profit last year, so they're celebrating by laying off 14,000 workers (a number they say will rise to 30,000). This is the kind of thing that Wall Street loves, and this layoff comes after a string of pronouncements from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about how AI is going to let them fire tons of workers.
Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan (21 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:
Pluralistic: How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (16 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
Pluralistic: “Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:
Companies That Replaced Humans With AI Are Realizing Their Mistake
As AI agents have yet to pay for themselves, more and more executives are waking up to the sloppy reality of AI hype.
The loudest warning about AI and jobs yet
200 economists and AI leaders say something big is happening. What should we do about it? Plus: Apple sues OpenAI
Will AI Destroy the Economy? (According to Economists: No.) | AI Reality Check | Cal Newport
Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.
Companies Are Blaming AI for Layoffs. The Real Reason Will Piss You Off.
180,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2025. Companies say it’s because of AI. Oxford researchers call BS.
AI layoffs are looking more and more like corporate fiction that's masking a darker reality, Oxford Economics suggests | Fortune
"Firms don't appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale," the firm said. It suspects some are trying to "dress up layoffs" as good news.
Anthropic and Wall Street giants prepare $1.5 billion project to sell AI to businesses – Oninvest
Investors in the project include Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, The Wall Street Journal has learned
Bosses Are Blowing More Money on AI Agents Than It'd Cost Them to Just Pay Human Workers
Some organizings are finding themselves spending more on AI token fees than they do paying human salaries.
Timing Is Everything in the AI Bubble
This week's tech sell-off is a symptom of a deeper problem: no one knows when - or how - big tech's $1 trillion bet on AI is going to pay off.
"AI" is Automated Inequality
Tech bros still dominate the discussions about so-called "AI" with false claims. Even most "AI"-critical researchers spend much of their time meticulously debunking (always only a subset of) claims, leaving vast areas of the economic consequences of "AI" unexplored. (Even the "AI"-evangelist Economi
‘You’re effed’: Palantir CEO says AI ‘will destroy humanities jobs’ – but Gen Z workers are apparently deliberately sabotaging AI rollouts in an effort to fight back
Gen Z workers are fighting against their own redundancy
New from us: Anthropic just published scenarios for AI’s possible economic impacts, which range from minimal, to explosive GDP growth of 15% by 2030 as knowledge-worker unemployment hits 18%. I sat down with their co-founder Jack Clark to pick his brains on how they’re thinking about all of this.
