Tag Archives: AI and unemployment

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They Will Exploit Everything: Hand Surveillance at Meta Platforms

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Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees in May 2026 and reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles. The layoffs would affect 10% of the company, or roughly 8,000 employees, and that the company would also cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles….Meta is full steam ahead into a gargantuan effort to reimagine its workforce and become more nimble to compete with AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train its AI models on how to use computers.

Sentiment among the company’s staffers is at its most negative level on record. More than 1,500 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta dies not collect employee “computer-use” data to train its AI models. When asked if there was a way to opt out of the AI computer-tracking program, a Meta executive replied that there wasn’t.

Excerpt from Meghan Bobrowsky et al, Meta Begins Laying Off Thousands of Employees as It Transforms Around AI Investments, WSJ, May 20, 2026

AI or Just Bots: the Truth about Artificial Intelligence

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Americans are becoming increasingly convinced that artificial intelligence is actually thinking like humans do…This fuels narratives about a future in which AI takes over the economy, leading to heightened insecurity for all of us while providing cover for companies that might be laying off workers for other reasons. It leads us to accept as true answers that are frequently made up or incorrect, even when we are repeatedly told that chatbots can’t stop delivering this kind of misinformation…Our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments… We have evolved to view linguistic fluency as a proxy for intelligence, and engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness. Builders of AI tools lean in to this deliberately. The humanlike qualities of chatbots are a calculated effort by designers and engineers to make AI more useful, but also more compelling and stickier [i.e. addictive]—just like social media.

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman… warned that today’s seemingly conscious AIs [consists of a bunch of] highly accelerated information processors. “These systems are not waking up,” he wrote. “They are retracing and mirroring the contours of human drama and debate, as documented in their vast training data.” He recommends a solution: “Developers must actively engineer the illusion of consciousness out of the products.”…

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals and even inanimate objects, says Ayanna Howard, dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and a robotics….Humans’ trusting nature makes sense for social creatures who must cooperate with members of their own tribe to survive. With AI and robots, however, this same tendency leads us to trust any system that appears to listen, understand and want to help, a phenomenon Howard calls “over-trust.” Today’s AIs are engineered to actively induce us to over-trust them, she adds. They do this by behaving in ways that are friendly and helpful, mimicking us through memory and personalization.

Excerpt from Christopher Mims, Why Even Smart People Believe AI Is Really Thinking, WSJ, Mar. 20, 2026

McKinsey Loves its Bots and Proud of It

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Companies have paid dearly for McKinsey’s human expertise for nearly a century, relying on the firm’s armies of consultants to synthesize complex information, crunch huge amounts of data and map out solutions to thorny business challenges. But what happens now that AI can do much of that analysis in a matter of minutes—and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck to boot?… McKinsey has reduced its head count…and rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents. These bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients.

Traditionally, a strategy project might have required a project leader, four consultants and a partner. Today, it might need a leader and two or three consultants—alongside a few AI agents and access to “deep research” capabilities. Bob Sternfels, head of McKinsey, said he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when McKinsey has one AI agent for every human it employs. “We’re going to continue to hire, but we’re also going to continue to build AI agents,” he said. 

Excerpt from Conor Grant, AI Comes for Consulting, McKinsey Faces an “Existential” Shift, WSJ, Aug. 8, 2025