What Happens to Us When Work Disappears?
For centuries, work has shaped our identities. It has given us purpose, structure, and status. But now, in the early days of the AI revolution, that foundation is shifting—fast. Not because of war, recession, or offshoring, but because of algorithms. And as work itself begins to vanish, we are left with unsettling questions: What does it mean to labor in an AI-driven economy? And what happens when that labor is no longer needed?
Over the past month, I spoke with executives, researchers, and frontline workers to understand how AI is reshaping the world of work. What emerged is a complex, contradictory picture—one filled with efficiency and exploitation, innovation and displacement, profit and pain.
From the Top: A View Obsessed with Efficiency
At the highest levels of corporate America, AI is met with unfiltered enthusiasm. Elijah Clark, an AI implementation consultant and CEO, is blunt: “CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities AI brings. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a raise.”
For executives like Clark, AI is less a technological marvel than a cost-cutting miracle. He recalls eliminating 27 of 30 student workers from a sales team. “What they took a week to produce, AI can do in under an hour,” he says. Human labor, in this view, is inefficient—and expendable.
Peter Miscovich, Global Future of Work Leader at JLL, puts it in a broader context. “AI is accelerating a trend that’s been happening for 40 or 50 years,” he says. Companies are shrinking their workforces while growing revenue and reducing their physical footprints. By 2025, he notes, one in five Fortune 500 companies will have fewer employees than they did a decade ago.
Yet Miscovich also imagines a softer future—offices designed like boutique hotels, with “highly amenitized” spaces meant to attract top talent. He calls them “experiential workplaces,” adding, “You can whip the children, or you can give them candy. People respond better to the candy.”
Still, this optimistic vision coexists with plans for deep workforce cuts. “Some companies are preparing for a 40% reduction in headcount,” Miscovich admits. Clark is even more direct: “Every company is looking for ways to save money. And layoffs are on the table—right now.”
The Hidden Human Cost
While executives speak in terms of strategy and scale, the ground-level reality tells a different story—one of exhaustion, exploitation, and invisibility.
Adrienne Williams, a former Amazon warehouse worker and now a fellow at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), calls it a “new era of forced labor.” She’s not just talking about warehouse shifts and delivery routes. She’s talking about all of us—how our everyday interactions with phones, apps, and online platforms help train AI systems, often without our knowledge or consent.
“You’re already training AI,” she says. “We’re doing invisible labor that generates real value, but we have no control over it. We should have sovereignty over our data.”
Krystal Kauffman, a long-time worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, agrees. Since 2015, she’s watched gig work evolve from varied microtasks to an almost singular focus on data labeling and annotation—work that underpins nearly every AI system. “People think AI is thinking,” she says, “but it’s just pattern recognition. And it needs humans to teach those patterns.”
This “human-in-the-loop” labor is often precarious and poorly paid. Workers receive no benefits, no protections—and often suffer severe mental and physical strain. Kauffman recalls one content moderator who had to annotate videos from a war-torn region where his family lived. “He saw his own cousin in the footage,” she says. “They told him to get over it and keep working.”
Williams has seen similar harm in warehouses and classrooms alike. Pregnant workers are denied accommodations. Children in schools are suffering physical pain from AI-based learning systems. “I’ve talked to women who lost pregnancies because Amazon wouldn’t modify their duties,” she says. “This isn’t progress. It’s exploitation.”
Preserving the Dignity of Human Work
Despite these grim realities, voices are fighting to redefine the role of work—not as a casualty of automation, but as a space for dignity, care, and meaning.
Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, is one such voice. She champions “care work”—the labor of supporting children, the elderly, and people with disabilities—as central to any humane economy. “This is work that can’t be automated,” she says. “It’s deeply human.”
For Poo, technology should be used to support care workers, not replace them. She envisions a future with robust labor protections: universal healthcare, paid leave, affordable childcare, and a livable minimum wage. “We need a new safety net,” she says. “One that recognizes care as essential infrastructure.”
Many of the care workers she represents earn as little as $22,000 a year. Still, they stay in the profession for decades. “They see it as a calling,” Poo says. “And they deserve to be paid with dignity for it.”
Two Futures: One Choice
The future of work stands at a fork in the road. One path leads to deeper inequality, with AI used to maximize profits and marginalize workers. The other imagines a society where technology is designed with—and for—human beings.
Adrienne Williams warns that unless checked, AI will “exacerbate every problem we already have,” especially for low-income and marginalized communities. But Poo remains hopeful that a different future is still within reach. “We can democratize AI,” she says. “We can give working-class people the power to shape it.”
That movement is already growing. Kauffman sees a new energy among gig workers: “For years, the company treated us like we didn’t exist. But now we’re organizing, pushing back. Saying: No more.”
The Meaning of Work in an Age of Machines
The core question AI forces us to confront is not just what jobs it will replace—but what it will replace in us. If work has long been a source of pride, purpose, and belonging, what happens when that is taken away?
Elijah Clark is clear about the corporate mindset: “The humanness is not a factor. It’s about growth, efficiency, and profit.” But for Ai-jen Poo, the meaning of work runs deeper. “Work should give people pride,” she says. “A sense of contribution to their families, communities, and to society. It should offer recognition and agency over their future.”
Our Take: The Clock Is Ticking
We are running out of time. Across industries, companies are using AI not to empower workers—but to erase them. A generation is being taught—implicitly and explicitly—that their skills, their labor, even their humanity, are replaceable.
This outcome is not inevitable. There are choices to be made. We can pass stronger laws. Build a real safety net. Recognize data labor as labor. And most of all, invest in the kind of human work—care, connection, creativity—that machines can’t replicate.
But we must act now. As Clark told me, blunt as ever: “I’m being hired today to figure out how to cut jobs with AI. Not in ten years. Right now.”
The real question is no longer whether AI will change work.
It’s whether we’ll let it change what it means to be human.