AI Is Taking Our Jobs — Technocrats Call It “Empowerment”

Newswire by qpooqpoo

Original Article: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/21/ai-job-cuts-amazon-microsoft-and-more-cite-ai-for-2025-layoffs.html

Economic research attributes only a fraction of recent layoffs to AI, but the numbers tell us less than they appear to. The low ratio now likely reflects an economy still in the earliest stages of integrating AI into the workforce.  There is every reason to believe that this trend will accelerate since technological systems can perform quantitative tasks faster, more accurately, cheaper, and at greater scale than humans. Substitution of humans with the new technology is not optional—it's compelled by technical necessity, competition, and natural selection. Firms that don't replace human labor with AI demonstrating this superior efficiency will lose out to firms that do.

Most companies today are experimenting with AI. Few have fully restructured workflows around it, and fewer still have reorganized employees around AI-first operations. It's therefore not a surprise that AI accounts for only 4-5% of layoffs, assuming the numbers are correct (a bold assumption given how obscure and difficult "AI-caused job dislocation" is to measure). But this is like measuring electricity's effect on employment in 1895. The ratio is low because we are early, not because AI's impact will be small.

To push this through, tech companies end up gaslighting the public—offering crude, ham-fisted sops to obvious anxieties. Take the quote from Microsoft's CEO as a prime example:

“What does empowerment look like in the era of AI? It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It’s about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools. That’s the shift we are driving — from a software factory to an intelligence engine empowering every person and organization to build whatever they need to achieve.”

It's difficult to read this without wondering whether it's intended as parody. That's the word "empower" three times in four sentences. At this point it's straight mantric incantation.

Anyway, societies usually praise certain values in inverse proportion to the extent that those values are expressed in the context of real life. "Freedom" in highly regulated societies, "community" in atomized ones, and "empowerment" when individuals have little practical agency.  

The idea that AI will "empower" people is ridiculous, under any conceivable scenario.  The average person will have more information and processing power at their disposal...but to what end?  To what practical use can individuals put this supposed new power? They won't be adopting these tools because they are liberating—they'll adopt them because they have to. Once AI becomes the standard in education, employment, and communication, refusing to use it simply means falling behind. And once everyone is using the same tools, no one is meaningfully "empowered." There is no comparative advantage. The baseline simply shifts and the playing field is leveled. Power, after all, is relative. If every person gains the same capabilities, then no individual gains power within the system. But the organizations that design, own, and operate these systems do gain unprecedented and disproportionate power over individuals. For individuals, the "benefits" amount ultimately to more entertainment... and we've all seen how little the avalanche of new forms of entertainment in modern society have impacted happiness. A fulfilling life requires meaningful control over the serious, practical, life-and-death conditions of one's existence, not endless entertainment. So people will generate images, write code snippets, automate e-mails, etc... who cares. They will not control production, control infrastructure, control institutions—in short, all the major systems that govern their lives. The rhetoric of empowerment masks this deepening asymmetry of control.

The standard reassurance that "technology always creates new jobs" lurks in the background as a final comfort. This notion mistakes a short 200-year pattern for a historical law and ignores the critical question of what kind of work replaces what is lost.  Several of the examples in the article subtly point toward a familiar reassurance: that while AI removes certain roles, it creates new, more “advanced” ones. IBM notes increased hiring in software engineering and sales. Amazon speaks of “more ownership” and leaner structures. Executives describe a shift in the types of work rather than a simple elimination of it. But this framing avoids a more important question: what are the broader effects of this new type of work? AI does not simply shift labor into new fields; it accelerates trends of alienation, surveillance, and rigid obedience.  If the result is not mass unemployment, then its work that is increasingly narrow, impersonal, disconnected from reality, and, ultimately, less fulfilling.

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