A few days ago, I was scrolling the news and saw that Amazon is cutting jobs again. Not hundreds. Thirty thousand. The wild part? Revenue is up. Stock price is up. Business is booming. And still—slice, slice, slice.
Even though the company never said the quiet part out loud, the timing and the types of roles being eliminated line up almost perfectly with the explosion of AI productivity. You can feel the unspoken tension across the entire Valley.
My first thought was painfully simple:
Important This might be the start of a new era where “the better a company performs, the more people it cuts.”
Later, I had a video call with a friend in Silicon Valley. He sipped his coffee and shrugged, “Yeah… our department’s been cut down to the handful of people whose names everyone actually remembers.”
He said it like a joke. I felt a chill.
The first wave of layoffs isn’t “poor performers” — it’s the people AI can replace
Imagine a company announcing, “We’ll have AI handle a lot of this going forward.”
Who’s suddenly in danger?
Not the slackers. It’s the steady, reliable folks doing documentation, dashboards, reports, basic code, coordination — the quiet backbone of a team.
Take junior developers: Before, even if you struggled, a senior engineer could cover for you. Now AI can churn out a rough version, and the senior just fixes it. In that chain, the easiest link to remove is the newcomer.
Then there’s middle management: These were the people responsible for decks, reports, coordination, summarizing decisions. AI is absurdly good at… decks, reports, coordination, summarizing decisions.
Suddenly, whoosh — gone like dust in a breeze.
My friend joked, “Internally we say AI is like the new intern: not perfect, but cheap, tireless, and always online.”
I couldn’t help picturing an army of AI interns crowding outside a tech campus. The image was weirdly cinematic.
AI isn’t as smart as you fear — and it isn’t as dumb as you hope
A small confession: I once asked an AI tool to help me draft a data analysis report. What came out looked like the kind of thing that says, “I have structure, but please don’t give this to your boss.”
Eighty percent correct, twenty percent dangerously wrong — and the wrong bits are the kind that get you fired if you skip the review.
Someone ran an experiment on Upwork: they used AI to take on tasks like data analysis, reporting, game development. The user satisfaction rate for fully AI-completed work was… 2%.
Note Is it reliable? Not really.
Is it useful? Kinda.
Does it speed you up? Absolutely.
AI won’t replace you. AI plus one human will replace two humans.
And in the eyes of management, “one person doing the work of two” is the only sentence that matters.
The saddest part is the people who haven’t even started
What worries me the most isn’t layoffs — it’s the kids entering the workforce.
Entry-level jobs used to be training rooms. You learned slowly. You made mistakes. You grew.
Now those rooms are disappearing from LinkedIn like they owe someone money.
Companies don’t want to train beginners when “AI + a senior employee” is cheaper and more efficient.
This means freshmen are expected to perform at near-mid-level speed on day one. That’s brutal. Most young people simply aren’t prepared for that tempo.
Reality doesn’t care. It’s already happening.
Big companies will become the new utilities
Compute will be the new electricity. Data will be the new fuel.
Big tech will own the infrastructure. The rest of us will need to master one thing:
Important How to use AI to build our own projects, run our own experiments, create our own value.
The most impressive people in the future won’t be “Senior Something at Some Big Company.” They’ll be super individuals — people who wield a swarm of AI tools to make videos, write code, build businesses, write essays, design products.
You won’t need a company to hand you resources. You’ll need the skill of orchestrating AI like a team of shadow clones.
That image alone feels… oddly poetic.
So how do ordinary people stay safe?
Here are the three most honest suggestions I can offer.
1. Don’t dodge AI. The earlier you learn, the easier it is.
You can avoid it for a few months. You can’t avoid it for a few years.
Try something tiny. Use ChatGPT to draft your next email. Let Midjourney design the cover of your next slide deck. Start with something that feels fun, not scary.
2. Find the things you genuinely enjoy messing with.
AI is a tool. Your curiosity is not.
Spend 15 minutes listing three things that make you forget time. Then ask AI: “What side projects or income streams could exist around these?” Treat it like your free creative coach.
3. Build skills that survive outside a company.
Whether you write, code, design, consult — your value should stand independently of your employer.
Try answering a question on Reddit, Quora, Zhihu, or writing a short post in your domain. The goal isn’t money. The goal is to test whether your knowledge helps strangers.
If it does, you have leverage.
The wind of AI is fierce — but it doesn’t have to blow you over
We’re living through a once-in-a-generation moment. It’s equal parts frightening and exhilarating.
AI won’t tell you who you are. It won’t decide your destiny.
It simply puts new possibilities on the table. Whether you reach for them — that part is human.
Tip The future won’t belong to people who hide from the wind.
It will belong to the people who learn to fly with it.