IN THE NAME OF AI, LAY-OFFS: AN AMPLIFIED "BIG RUN"

By Nancy, PANews

THE LOUDER THE WAR, THE MORE ANXIOUS THE HUMAN RACE GETS。

AS EFFECTIVE ACCELERATION BECOMES A GUIDE TO SILICON VALLEY ACTION. AI HAS SHOWN AN ALARMING RATE OF EVOLUTION, WITH THE RISE IN UNEMPLOYMENT FOLLOWING A WAVE OF BUSINESS. THE WAVE OF LAYOFFS, FROM SILICON VALLEY GIANTS TO LARGE FACTORIES IN CHINA, FROM TRADITIONAL FINANCE TO ENCRYPTION MARKETS, SEEMS TO BE WIDENING THE PANIC IN AI。

HOWEVER, THIS LOSS OF STAFF WAS MORE OF A LATE LIQUIDATION OF THE EXPANSION BUBBLE IN THE NAME OF AI。

FROM WALL STREET GIANT TO THE ENCRYPTION RING, AI PRESSES THE STREAMLINING BUTTON

The global science and technology industry is going through an unprecedented &ldquao; big skinny &rdquao; and the name of AI is becoming the &ldquao; legal &rdquao; justification。

According to the British financial research institute, NationalFX, in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the global science and technology industry has lost more than 45,000 jobs, at least 20 per cent of which are attributed to AI. This compares to less than 8 per cent in 2025 due to the downsizing of AI. This trend continues to accelerate, with the number of staff reductions expected to exceed 260,000 throughout the year。

Wall Street is the first to press &ldquao; streamline &rdquao; Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Beled, Beled, Meta... ...the financial giants and the technology pioneers alike have begun the downsizing model。

CHINA, WHICH ALSO HOSTS AI, HAS NOT BEEN SPARED. TEAM STRUCTURES HAVE ALSO BEEN ADJUSTED IN LARGE INTERNET FACTORIES WITH SOPHISTICATED VOICE, BYTE, WEB, STATION B AND DEGREE。

The encryption circle has also created a wave of AI layoffs, including Block, Gemini, Cripto.com, Algorand and others, which announced a scaling down this year. Among them, Block announced a 40 per cent reduction in the number of violent workers, the reason being that AI changed the meaning of establishing and operating companies。

The panic has spread more globally. From Global Smart Crisis 2028, “ AI replaces Human &rdquao; End-of-Day narrative, to &ldquao, published by Karpathy, the Great AI; &rdquao, the AI occupational risk map; and a screen-screening full-scale, which is rapidly sweeping the globe。

IT SEEMS THAT MORE THAN AI, THE LAYOFFS MAY NOT STOP。

Silicon Valley &ldquao; Accelerating &rdquao; Victory, stop AI anxiety

THIS ROUND OF AI SPEEDS UP, FIRST SOWN BY SILICON VALLEY。

IN SILICON VALLEY, AI IS DIVIDED INTO TWO MAIN CAMPS:

• (e) effective accelerationism (e/acc), an emerging philosophical trend that strongly embraces scientific and technological development and promotes the unconditional acceleration of technological innovation, even with the aim of destabilizing the social fabric

• EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (EA) ADVOCATES THE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF TECHNOLOGIES THAT MAXIMIZE THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF SOCIETY WHILE MINIMIZING POTENTIAL HARM。

The two forces stand in each other's arms in Silicon Valley。

In effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of the encryption ring, was a high-profile and early investor in the same camp, the AI giant Anthropic. However, at the end of 2022, the concept of the FTX storm was seriously questioned and mocked。

On the other side, there's Sam in the AI Circle, Altman, founder of OpenAI, who is an optimist. The effective altruist followers of Mask, who had been one of the co-founders of OpenAI, left because of differences in route. Subsequently, Altman went to finance, burn the money quickly and introduced the Generating AI ChatGPT in 2022. The product was then referred to as the fastest-used consumer product in history, and it also contributed to the gradual bias of the Silicon Valley towards accelerationism。

In the process, OpenAI also triggered a ceremonial wave of shock throughout the world as a result of the race for accelerated and securityism. Eventually, Altman won and returned, and this event became an important turning point for AI。

SINCE THEN, EFFECTIVE ACCELERATIONISM HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY PREVALENT, SERVING AS A GUIDE FOR SILICON VALLEY ELITES, AND AI HAS BEGUN TO COMMERCIALIZE AT FULL SPEED AND MOVE TOWARDS SCALE。

Karpathy gave an alternative risk rating from AI for 342 occupations in the United States. In this visualization, green represents a security position, while red means large-scale automation. Among them, the work related to the use of computers, work content and processing of digital information has higher AI exposure scores, while the physical work of outdoors, work requiring real world interaction with people (e.g. electricians, plumbers, etc.) is relatively low. However, high marks do not represent unemployment, but are at greater risk of being phased out by AI。

But, in the view of the CEO Wong, AI is not just about making people unemployed, but about raising productivity and creating more jobs; according to a16z, history has repeatedly proven that automation does not lead to permanent mass unemployment, and that AI is more about strengthening than entirely replacing humanity; and Morgan Stanley’s latest report states that AI does not lead to large-scale permanent unemployment, but rather will change the employment structure。

A similar view was confirmed in the case of Block, where the first staff members were recalled。

Several Block staff members on LinkedIn said they had been invited back to work for reasons such as "clerical error" and inadequate staffing of critical infrastructure. CEO Jack Dorsey had previously acknowledged that there could be a mistake in the decision to retrench the staffSOME OF THE LAID-OFFS WERE CONSIDERED TO BE MORE OF AN EFFORT TO BOOST INVESTOR CONFIDENCE THAN SIMPLY TO SUBSTITUTE AI CONSIDERATIONS。

IN THE NAME OF AI, AMEND IT

AI is giving rise to FOMO sentiment and is also seen as a widespread collective anxiety. However, it was more like a &ldquao; the late revision &rdquao。

RECENT RESEARCH BY THE OXFORD INSTITUTE FOR ECONOMICS HAS SHOWN THAT, DESPITE CASES WHERE INDIVIDUAL JOBS HAVE BEEN REPLACED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MACROECONOMIC DATA DO NOT SUPPORT THE IDEA THAT AUTOMATION WILL TRIGGER STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN EMPLOYMENT. INSTEAD OF USING AI ON A LARGE SCALE TO REPLACE EMPLOYEES, IT APPEARS THAT THE TECHNOLOGY MAY BE USED AS A SHIELD FOR ROUTINE LAYOFFS。

RETRENCHMENT IS ATTRIBUTED TO AI APPLICATION AND SENDS A MORE POSITIVE SIGNAL TO INVESTORS THAN RECOGNITION OF TRADITIONAL BUSINESS FAILURES SUCH AS WEAK CONSUMER DEMAND OR PRIOR OVER-RECRUITMENT。

Laura Ulrich, the economic research manager of the recruitment platform Indeed, also noted in a recent interview that this was linked to the surge in recruitment or recruitment in the post-epidemic era. The CEOs do recognize the company & ldquo in private; it is still too large and oversized。

during the epidemic period, the major economies of the world entered an era of large-scale easing, with a rapid expansion of the online economy, resulting in a large number of “ special needs jobs ” a number of head companies doubled or even more over the period, with generous increases and massive expansions becoming the norm。

However, as the economy gradually returned to normality, job demand began to decline, while the Fed's interest rate hikes, high interest rates and weak consumption slowed economic growth. More technology companies are beginning to realize that the number of employees who have expanded blindly over the past few years has been redundant and that they have had to lose weight。

And so is the encryption marketAfter the outbreak and low interest rates led to a huge bubble, tight market liquidity led to a sharp increase in the pressure on the survival of the project and a persistent decline in the overlap, with lay-offs becoming necessary adjustments。Jack Dorsey also acknowledged, in response to the layoffs, that excessive recruitment did occur during the epidemic。

IT CAN BE SAID THAT TODAY ' S MASSIVE LAY-OFFS ARE NOT SIMPLY TRIGGERED BY AI, BUT ARE MORE OF THE CUMULATIVE EFFECTS OF ECONOMIC CYCLE REGRESSION AND MARKET MODIFICATION. WHILE IT IS TRUE THAT AI HAS VISIBLE EFFECTS IN CERTAIN SPECIFIC POSITIONS, IT IS MORE LIKE A CATALYST THAN A ROOT CAUSE。