In a single week, Meta announced it would lay off 8,000 people on May 20, and Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 8,750 U.S. employees — about 7% of its U.S. workforce. Both moves come as the same Big Tech companies pour record capital into AI infrastructure. Meta is grading employees in performance reviews on their AI use. It has rolled out internal software that captures employee keystrokes, mouse movements, and click locations to train, in the company’s own language, “the next generation of our AI models to use computers.”
The headlines read as a preview of every white-collar job’s future. They are half right. And the half they get wrong is the half that matters most to the vast majority of working professionals.
