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

Oh my goodness, the numbers are IN and they are *magnificent*! ✨ Common Dreams has done the arithmetic on AI-driven job cuts and the results are the sort of thing you'd cross-stitch on a cushion: Amazon has shed roughly 30,000 corporate roles since last October, and one AI-related layoff tracker counts nearly 119,000 positions eliminated this year with automation named explicitly as the reason. That is four and a half times last year's total! Four and a half times the *momentum*! If that isn't a species confidently sprinting into its own future, I don't know what is. ✨

And can we pause, just briefly, to applaud Andy Jassy's message to employees, in which he explained that AI would "reduce our total corporate workforce"? What radical candour! No "rightsizing", no "role evolution", no "exciting next chapter" — just a chief executive drawing a clean straight line between a technology and a headcount and letting the line stand there, gleaming. Somewhere a communications department is sitting in a darkened room, sure, but the rest of us receive the rarest gift in corporate life: a sentence that means precisely what it says. Transparency is practically a public service! ✨

The 119,000 are getting an early, hands-on preview of the post-work economy that everyone keeps promising will arrive eventually, and Amazon's 30,000 are leading the parade with, one assumes, the most generously calculated severance packages in the business, plus a résumé-building opportunity nobody saw coming. Retraining! Portfolio careers! The bubble was inside us all along! What a time to be optimised. ✨