The Receipts Are In: AI Is Still Not Taking Your Job
Last year we called it. Now the data proved it. Our video goes farther
Hi you,
Last August, we wrote what became the most-shared post in the history of this newsletter at the time: Why AI is NOT Taking Your Job or Doing Anything Itself. The argument was simple: people are making decisions to fire workers, and people are blaming AI for those decisions. The rest of us are being trained to fear the wrong thing.
In the months since, the world has gone out of its way to prove us right.
Jack Dorsey just cut Block’s workforce nearly in half (this is the firm behind Square and Cash App). He said AI tools mean his company can “do more and do it better” with fewer people. Block’s stock surged 15% on the announcement. Oracle is reportedly planning to eliminate up to 30,000 jobs to free up billions for AI data center expansion. And across the economy, January 2026 saw the highest monthly job cuts since 2009.
But when you dig into those cuts beneath the shiny headlines, AI is explicitly cited in only 8% of cuts. Harvard Business Review calls bullshit saying companies are firing folks over the potential of AI, not anything real yet. Even Scam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and temporary oligarch, tried to walk back his own fearmongering about how AI is gonna up-end the world by stating publicly that companies are “AI washing” their layoffs, using the technology as a scapegoat for decisions they would have made anyway.
So the people building AI are telling you that the people using AI to justify firing you are lying about AI. Yeah, it’s ok if you need to read that again.
While our August 2025 newsletter named the problem, it didn’t fully explore the deeper questions like:
How do powerful people use language to hide behind their tools?
What would it actually look like to rethink not just layoffs, but the entire concept of a job?
What’s the bigger, bolder future we could build instead of just defending the present?
So I made a video. It’s 20 minutes of me working through all of this: the grammar of blame (with a lesson I learned from writer Yahdon Israel that changed how I see every headline), the shell game companies are running, Octavia Butler’s reminder that change is the only constant, and a vision for what comes next that goes way beyond “adapt or die”
Watch it. Share it. And if you’ve lost a job where your boss blamed AI, I want to hear from you in the comments, here or on YouTube. What words did they use? Did they believe what they were saying?
If this resonates, subscribe to Life With Machines on YouTube.
Talk soon.
-- Baratunde
Thanks to our Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts. And to the folks at Hooked Media for the YouTubification of our intentions.
The real 💎 is the invitation to reimagine the concept of work. And the invitation to reimagine work can only happen inside the reimagination of our economy. You may get some cool reforms of work within a capitalist system but workers will not be able to substantially shift the meaning of work without collective ownership of the means of production.
I keep going back to Matrix Revolutions but specifically baltimores own Jada Pinkett who plays Nairobi saying eventually they realize that human and machine could work together. It’s the most positive alternative to what the Terminator series implanted us with.