The most on point headline I have seen in a hot minute.
Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract — laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity. In short, these are political choices masquerading as technical necessities, AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.
The growing share of white-collar workers rendered precarious or redundant by capital’s technological drive form a new surplus population or a pool of disposable and downwardly mobile workers used to depress wages and normalize insecurity. They are not external to capitalism but internal to its reproduction.