AI and Jobs
How artificial intelligence is reshaping work, eliminating roles, and creating new ones. The numbers are real. The layoffs are happening. We report without spin.
71.7% of Japanese farmers are over 65. The average age is 69.2. The agricultural workforce fell 62.6% between 2000 and 2024. Japan is not automating to cut costs — it is automating because there is no one left to hire. It is the global laboratory for what happens when demographic collapse meets AI.
Oracle traded up to 30,000 jobs for $156 billion in AI infrastructure. TD Cowen calculated the return: $8–10 billion in free cash flow. The employees received an email from 'Oracle Leadership.' No name. Just the number.
Microsoft's research doesn't rank jobs by education level. It ranks them by physical exposure. The 20 most vulnerable roles are almost entirely desk-bound. The 20 safest almost all require a body in the room.
Close Brothers is axing 600 roles after a mis-selling scandal. AI is cited as the efficiency tool enabling the cuts. The bank didn't need AI to fail. It needed AI to make the failure look like progress.
AI reads scans. Ninety percent of U.S. health systems have deployed it for radiology. Only 19% report high success. The radiologist is not disappearing. But the career path is becoming impossible to plan, and that uncertainty is its own kind of damage.
Crypto.com eliminated 12% of its workforce on the same week it doubled down on an AI domain that cost $70 million. CEO Kris Marszalek called it evolution. The 180 people who lost their jobs might choose a different word.
Larry Fink has told a generation of college graduates that they studied the wrong thing. He is not entirely wrong. But BlackRock's $100M answer to a 300,000-worker deficit is not a solution. It is a press release.
Nvidia's CEO tells us that companies cutting jobs in the name of AI simply lack imagination. Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have collectively eliminated over 46,000 positions while doubling their AI budgets. They apparently disagree.
Anthropic's new labor study finds no unemployment spike yet. Read it carefully. The signal worth watching is buried in the last section: the hiring door for young workers is already narrowing.
28% of game developers have been laid off in the past two years. 52% now say generative AI is bad for the industry. The GDC 2026 report is not a warning. It is a body count.
Amazon has cut 16,000 corporate jobs and its own CEO explicitly named AI as the reason. This is not an anomaly. It is the clearest signal yet of what comes next.
