Where did your paycheck go? And where did your truth go?
I recently came across a few stories and sets of data. Reading them sent a chill down my spine.
We keep telling ourselves that AI is a technological revolution. It is not. For most people, it is a quiet robbery.
Let us look at our wallets first.
In 2023, the US tech industry laid off 264,000 people. Another 153,000 in 2024. And 124,000 in 2025. Three years. Over 540,000 people packing their boxes. Logically, a company fires people because it is running out of money. But in today’s tech world, the logic is entirely backward. The day they announce layoffs is usually the day the stock price goes on a tear.
The reason is simple. Bringing in AI is not a tech problem at all. It is a financial equation sitting on the CFO’s desk.
Stanford economist Eric Brynjolfsson released a study this year showing AI doubled the growth rate of US productivity. Efficiency is definitely up. But did that extra money trickle down to the workers? Not at all.
During your performance review this year, your boss might smile and say: “Thanks to AI tools, your output equals two people now. We are thrilled.” Then they give you a 3% raise. The human costs the company saved went straight into the profit margins and the shareholders’ pockets. It is not your base salary going down. It is the amount of sweat behind every dollar you earn that got devalued.
What is even more hopeless is that the bottom stairs of the ladder have been kicked away.
Data from Revalue Labs shows hiring for junior programmers plummeted by 73.4%. If you cannot find a junior role, how do you learn from mistakes? How do you build judgment? How do you ever become a senior developer? The bottom rungs are gone. The people at the top are just dangling in midair. This is the cold reality economists call a K shape economy. The people at the top ride AI straight up into the clouds. The people at the bottom do not even get a ticket to enter the building.
The money is gone. The ladder is gone. But that is still not the most terrifying part.
If capital is draining our pockets, something else is draining the very foundation of our world.
Here is an incredibly absurd story.
Someone noticed the tech outlet Ars Technica wrote a piece about him. It included a massive block quote of his own words. The vocabulary sounded articulate and smart. The problem? He never said any of it.
Hours later, the outlet pulled the story and apologized. They admitted an AI wrote it. Want to know the deepest irony? The original subject of the news was how he had been slandered by AI. And in a news report about him being slandered, the AI literally fabricated quotes to spread more rumors about him.
A Russian nesting doll of absurdity.
This is not just a joke. It is about whether we can still trust anything right in front of our eyes.
In the real world, we put license plates on cars. Nobody thinks a license plate restricts your freedom. The point is that if you hit someone, we can track down who is responsible. But on today’s internet, that chain of accountability is snapped.
Imagine a controversial event. You go online and see a thousand posts praising it, and a thousand posts trashing it. All generated by machines. You, a living breathing human, try to make sense of the mess. Eventually, you will probably just say “screw it” and lock your screen. The real signals are gone. It is all just noise.
Every social system we built (the law, hiring, public debate) relies on a simple premise. Humans have stable identities and reputations. If someone is a jerk, we remember them and avoid them. But what if the invisible hand churning out all this toxic sludge is just an empty void?
The money gets funneled into the pockets of a tiny minority. And what is left for the rest of us is a wasteland where even real voices are drowned out entirely.
But this wasteland is not a law of nature. It is a social agreement we are currently tolerating.
The real threat is not AI taking over. It is a tiny fraction of humanity using AI to control everyone else. We have outgrown the old industrial-age rules that treat humans merely as low-level tools. The historical railroad switch is right in front of us. It is time to pull the switch.
Source:
利润暴涨却疯狂裁员？揭秘AI背后的残酷财务逻辑：你的工资去哪了？ #AI #裁员 #经济真相
The Pentagon vs. Anthropic + An A.I. Agent Slandered Me + Ho