AI Replaced Me

The biggest labor shock of 2026 won’t be layoffs—it’ll be the openings that never appear as AI quietly absorbs the marginal work.

Vanguard’s ledger flips the script: AI‑exposed office roles are growing faster and getting paid more as models strip out boilerplate and push humans into higher‑leverage work.

AI’s hit isn’t the headline layoffs—it’s the sudden thinning of the payroll-tax hose as Social Security’s depletion clock ticks.

2025 didn’t deliver an AI jobs apocalypse—it quietly erased the first rungs of careers, pushing hiring toward AI‑literate talent and forcing leaders to choose between cost cuts and capability.

Two AI heavyweights quietly reset expectations: agents won’t run unattended—near-term wins are boring, supervised, and built on foundation models.

25,000 engineers (for 1,000 slots) just signaled that the next AI standards may be authored inside agencies, not vendor decks.

“AI” just got its own checkbox in the layoff ledger—about 55,000 planned cuts—and that small box rewrites hiring, training, and how companies explain work.

For $25–$30 an hour, Tesla is turning factory and sales staff into in-car AI operators to widen Robotaxi coverage and convert every ride into training data under human-in-the-loop rules.

This weekend’s “historic labor shock” warning isn’t about inevitability—it’s about whether we can slow AI’s velocity enough to keep the first rungs of white-collar careers from disappearing.

When a central banker starts talking internships, it’s because AI just wiped out the first rung of white‑collar work—and the policy bill is coming due.