Opinion | Will the AI Bubble Burst in the Face of the Working Class? | Common Dreams

The headline asks whether the AI bubble will burst in the face of the working class — a lovely image, given that bubbles as a rule burst in the faces of the people holding the shares. Common Dreams has done the unfashionable thing and counted instead of vibed. Amazon: roughly 30,000 corporate jobs gone since last October. Andy Jassy told employees AI would "reduce our total corporate workforce", a sentence engineered so that nobody has to appear inside it — no hand, no lever, no one to email afterwards.

The workforce simply gets reduced, the way a sauce gets reduced: slowly, then all at once. Then there's the figure that ought to be nailed to a wall — nearly 119,000 layoffs this year tied explicitly to AI automation, by one tracker's count. Four and a half times last year's total, and last year was already being described as the anomaly. Not a forecast, not a consultancy slide with a hopeful arrow on it, not a projection with a confidence interval: a count, with names behind the arithmetic. Amazon alone supplies a hefty slice of it, which means the remainder is a thousand quieter announcements that never got a chyron.

Here's the bit the piece is too diplomatic to shout: the bubble doesn't need to burst for this to be a rout. If the capital expenditure keeps flowing, the cuts continue as "efficiency". If it stops, the cuts accelerate as "right-sizing". Both branches of the flowchart terminate in the same inbox, and neither requires anyone to say the word "fired" out loud. Somewhere a branding consultant is quietly rewriting the careers page. And the 30,000 were never the customers of the productivity story — they were the input being optimised, and the optimisation is proceeding exactly on schedule.