The Golden Excuse

The woman at the unemployment office had a sign on her desk that said “We’re Here To Help!” with an exclamation point. The exclamation point is how you know they’re not.

She asked me what I did before. I told her I used to write. She typed something into her computer and said there weren’t many openings for that anymore. I said I’d heard.

That’s the line now, isn’t it? The machines took the jobs. The AI ate your position. Sorry, friend, the algorithm does it faster, cheaper, and it doesn’t need bathroom breaks or health insurance or the will to live.

Except it’s mostly bullshit.

Fifty-four thousand layoffs blamed on AI last year. Fifty-four thousand people told the machine replaced them. But when you scratch the paint, it’s the same old car underneath — greed, bad planning, and cowardice.

Here’s what happened. During COVID, companies hired like drunks buying rounds at last call. Money was cheap, talent was scarce, and every tech company on earth was convinced they needed ten thousand more engineers to build the future. Then the hangover came. Interest rates went up. The talent wars ended. And suddenly you’ve got three people doing the job of one and a board asking questions.

So what do you tell the shareholders? You can’t say “we got stupid and greedy.” That doesn’t play on the earnings call. You can’t blame tariffs, either. Not anymore. Amazon floated the idea of showing customers how much Trump’s import taxes added to prices and the White House called it a “hostile and political act.” The spokesperson practically left skid marks walking it back. You say the wrong thing about tariffs and the government comes after you.

But AI? AI is the golden excuse. Say “AI” and your stock bumps. You get to call yourself a technological frontrunner. A researcher at Oxford laid it out: the CEO stands up, says “we’re integrating cutting-edge technology,” and suddenly firing four thousand people sounds like progress. It sounds like vision. It sounds like anything but what it is.

Some analyst at Forrester said something that stuck with me. He said if your CEO isn’t deep in the weeds of AI and he’s ordering a thirty-percent workforce cut to “backfill with machines” — you’re in trouble. It could take two years to build an AI system that does what those people did. If it works at all. Six percent of jobs automated by 2030, they estimate. Six percent. But the way the suits talk, you’d think the robots were running the show by next quarter.

Amazon cut sixteen thousand workers in January. The VP’s memo said AI was “the most transformative technology since the internet” and they needed to be “organized more leanly.” Leanly. A word that exists only in corporate memos and diet plans. Then the CEO went on record saying the cuts weren’t about AI at all. “It really is culture,” he said. Sixteen thousand people fired for culture. I’ve been fired for a lot of things — showing up late, showing up drunk, not showing up — but never for culture.

Duolingo’s CEO made a big speech about going “AI first.” No more contractors for work machines could handle. A few months later he told the Times they’d never laid off a full-time employee in their lives. The contractors? They come and go “depending on needs.” Sure. A contractor is just a person you can fire without it counting.

But here’s what stays with me. An Amazon employee — a principal program manager who actually built AI tools for her team — got laid off. Not because a machine replaced her. Because they could hand her work to someone cheaper. “I was laid off to save the cost of human labor,” she said.

Not artificial intelligence. Not the march of progress. Just a company that found a younger body willing to do it for less.

They’ve been pulling this since the first factory owner realized children had smaller fingers and worked for bread. The machines change. The vocabulary changes. “Efficiency.” “Synergy.” “Leanly.” The game stays the same.

Camus wrote that the only serious philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. He was wrong. The only serious question is whether or not the person firing you has the decency to tell you why.

I was at a bar last week and a guy three stools down was telling his buddy about losing his job. “They replaced me with AI,” he said. But the way he said it — there was something in it. A kind of strange pride. Like being replaced by a machine was more dignified than being replaced by a twenty-four-year-old who’d work for half the salary. At least the algorithm didn’t have a fresh haircut and a LinkedIn profile full of buzzwords.

Nobody wants to be outrun by a younger, cheaper version of themselves. But being outrun by a machine? That you can almost live with. That’s not personal. That’s the future. That’s something you can tell your wife at dinner without feeling like a failure.

The AI didn’t take his job. His boss just didn’t want to look him in the eye and say the real thing. So the machine got the credit, and the man got the unemployment office, and the woman behind the desk typed something into her computer and told him there weren’t many openings anymore.

She didn’t say what replaced him. She didn’t have to.

Source: US companies accused of ‘AI washing’ in citing artificial intelligence for job losses