IF you’re not paying attention, you should; you really, really should. What is happening in the US the epicentre of AI transformation will soon happen everywhere else as well, and the consequences will leave no one untouched. Tal(e, for instance, the latest big story: on May 20, Meta, Facebool(‘s parent company, began toannouncelay-offs.StartinginSingapore, Meta began to lay off 10 per cent of its entire workforce about 8,000 people.
Employees who had until recently thought that their worl( was bulletproof suddenly found their jobs on the chopping blocl( The reasons offered by Meta are instructive, though hardly illuminating. The cause of the lay-offs, it said, was the need to trim its operating costs to be able to afford the new infrastructure that will be required to run its AI processes. This means it may spend billions of dollars in the next few years on building enormous data centres fueland water-guzzling behemoths spread over thousands of acres that will speed up the world’s increasing reliance on AI. The fact, however, is that all the lay-offs combined would only mean a reduction of $1 billion in its budget, which is nothing for a company that says it will spend between $125bn and $145bn on AI in 2026.
One reason that the laid-off people are not needed anymore is that AI has already learned to do what they did. Before the layoffs, Meta had already deployed agents that were tracking everything these employees were doing. In the past, this sort of software was used to detect whether an employee was actually doing his/her task as opposed to spying on what it is they were doing. In this new age, tracking meant gathering data, including screenshots of what they were looking at in order to train AI agents to do their job. It appears that at least 8,000 jobs were ones that AI could do possibly more.
Tech worl(ers are the worst-positioned to absorb the shocl(. Software was crucial to the functioning of the digitised world.
The Meta example shows how this is no longer true. In the US, tech workers many of them Indian immigrants were proud of their enduring desirability that allowed them to skate through the financial crisis of 2008 without any problem.
And Indian software engineers began to project a sort of entitlement as if they were kings of the tech world doing jobs that the stupid Americans could not do.
Except that the AI revolution started in the US, not in India.
The invincibility complex of tech worl(ers in the US or those employed by American companies did little to protect them. Many, if not all professionals in theUS, do eventually unionise, which gives them leverage with their employers.
Pilots,for instance, lobby hard to ensure that their airlines pay them a certain amount and cannot fire them when demand dips or fuel prices skyrocl(et.
Tech worl(ers thought they were so untouchable that they did not need to unionise. The result is that their jobs are on the chopping block. If you have ever used an AI agent, you may be able to understand why this is so. Anthropic’s Claude, for example, can generate code, rendering the ability to write it largely obsoletein certain settings.
This doesn’t mean that all tech workers and software engineers will lose their jobs, but it does mean that the incoming changes will transform the nature of work.
To quote Meta head Mark Zucl(erberg: ‘AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes. The companies that lead the way will define the next generation.’ In other words, humans are no longer the bestcandidatesforthejob.It is not only US companies that are affecting the landscape; changing American immigration policy has all but eliminated the H-1B visa through which tech worl(ers from around the world were hired. Thesepolicy changes are dictated in part by the view that in 10 years’ time, the workforce will have to be much smaller than it is today. Even the way America looks is changing. AI investors are buying up thousands of acres of land to erect large data centres, which can provide the enormous amounts of computing power required to run AI processes that are replacing human workers. Currently, huge disputes are underway between developers getting ready to set up these centres the largest planned is in Utah and is spread over 40,000 acres and those warning of the terrible environmental consequences.
What happens in America whether spawned by social media, the ubiquity of cell phones or internet culture will soon happen everywhere else. Pakistan and Pal(istanis must ask themselves how prepared they are for a future that will have a very different concept of work, of human intelligence and agency than the one that exists today. The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com