Author: Scott Galloway
Originally published on Prof G MediaMay 8, 2026.
Few brands have fallen faster than America and AI over the past 18 months. Last week, I wrote about what I predicted would happen to America. This week, let’s talk about a prediction I don’t believe will happen: the AI jobs apocalypse. Every generation experiences a panic that their jobs will be taken over by machines. This comes with better PR and a bigger balance sheet. The AI employment apocalypse is not data-driven. It’s story-driven and designed by people who profit when you’re scared. Fear is the product. Capital is a result.
Wash and rinse repeatedly
Like every other technological innovation in history, I believe AI will cause job destruction, resulting in increased productivity, profits, reinvestment, and (wait for it) jobs. The relevant question is not how many jobs will be lost or gained, but whether the speed of disruption will overwhelm the period of adaptation and recovery. There are three scenarios. The bursting of the AI bubble. AI delivers as promised, but on a slower timeline. And AI disruption will happen faster than the market can adapt and respond.
labor market story
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that 50% of entry-level jobs in technology, law, consulting, and finance will disappear completely within five years. Last year he said Axios Unemployment rate could soar to 20% due to “white-collar bloodbath”. In 2023, when the AI story started to feel more optimistic, Elon Musk said, “There will come a time when jobs will no longer be needed…AI will be able to do everything.” In 2021, a year before launching ChatGPT, Sam Altman wrote, “Once sufficiently powerful AI enters the workforce, the price of many types of labor will approach zero.” Translation: AI is an extinction-level event for workers…according to those who will benefit most from AI being an extinction-level event.
Their story is as old as the Industrial Revolution. in Narrative Economics: How Stories Spread and Drive Major Economic EventsNobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller argued that fears about machines replacing human labor contributed to the economic downturn of the 19th century. Science fiction then reinforced this narrative, promoting the false belief that automation caused the Great Depression. Fears about the rise of computers exacerbated the double-dip recession of the early 1980s. According to Schiller, it’s not the interruption of labor that’s dangerous, but the negative feedback loop of the story. “Economic hardships caused by temporary recessions and depressions are misinterpreted as the job-destroying effects of machinery, creating a pessimistic economic response as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
With AI laundering masking inflation, tariffs, and overemployment, I believe we are poised for the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that Mr. Shiller warned about. Consider technology workers, the canaries in the coal mine. Net technology employment in the U.S. grew from 8.7 million in 2020 to 9.6 million in 2023 and has remained flat since then. Not great, but definitely not apocalyptic. Oracle laid off 18% of its workforce in March and projects negative cash flow through 2030, but it’s not capturing AI efficiencies, it’s trading talent for chips. Meta’s announcement last month that it would cut 10% of its workforce stoked fears about AI, but Meta is actually returning to its 2021 employee numbers. Microsoft’s 7% headcount reduction target would reduce its workforce to 2022 levels, but even after these cuts, Microsoft would still have 47% more employees than it had in the pre-pandemic year. Since its founding in 2023, xAI has grown to an estimated 5,000 employees. Musk announced in March that Tesla would increase its headcount, adding: “Tesla’s per capita output will be unusually high.” The following month, Tesla fired 10% of its employees due to poor sales. What we are seeing is not a harbinger of an employment apocalypse, but a labor market with fewer jobs and fewer layoffs, where the unemployment rate for everyone, including high-tech workers, is converging around the Fed’s target rate of 4%.
progress is chaos
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