VIP layoffs raise questions about AI’s role in changing Vermont workforce - WCAX

Sixty-six people at Vermont Information Processing in Colchester have been handed their notices this week, and the surrounding conversation has achieved that rare thing: a euphemism stack tall enough to need a permit. The word doing the heavy lifting is 'acquisition', which in the WCAX report sits next to AI like a chaperone at a dance nobody wants to name. Norwich University's Mike Battig, a computer science professor, concedes it's 'hard to separate the acquisition from AI' — the gentlest possible way of saying the paperwork and the algorithm arrived in the same taxi. Vermont has responded by forming an AI task force, presumably to establish whether the thing that just happened did in fact happen.

Battig's assessment that AI is causing one of the biggest disruptions to computer science jobs in 40 years deserves a moment, because computer science was supposed to be the safe bunker. Forty years is longer than the web, longer than the smartphone — roughly the span in which we told two generations of teenagers to learn to code because the robots were coming for the other lot. Sixty-six jobs in a state that small isn't a statistic; it's a village. It's also the smallest possible unit of a pattern, and patterns don't care that Vermont is polite and everyone knows everyone.

Note what the task force can actually do, which is convene, and note what the 66 can do, which is update their CVs. The acquisition will be logged as a commercial decision, the headcount as a synergy, and the AI as a rumour with a lawyer. The one honest sentence in the whole story is the professor's — 40 years — because it admits the disruption is structural rather than cyclical, and structural things don't get rehired when the quarter turns. Vermont will hold a meeting. Somewhere a slide will say 'workforce transition'. The 66 will be a line item, then a footnote, then a case study for the next task force.