You may recall an episode of Rod Serling’s original “The Twilight Zone” called “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”, an episode he wrote himself. It first aired almost exactly to the day 62 years ago. It tells the story of a factory where all the vast numbers of workers are laid off to be replaced with automated systems, with the twist at the end being the firm’s board of directors kicking out the owner Whipple himself to be replaced with AI — the famous “Robby the Robot” first seen in the 1956 film “Forbidden Planet”.
That’s a bunch of decades ago, but fast forward to 2026 and we see Big Tech billionaires taking a similar view of those pesky human employees. Big Tech today is in a wild, destructive frenzy laying off hundreds of thousands of highly skilled software engineers and other employees who made the firms successful. The firms will sometimes (but not always) claim outright that this is about Large Language Model AI systems replacing the employees, including often many of the employees ordered by management to build the AI rather than maintain and expand the non-AI systems so many people depend upon.
That’s typically PART of what’s going on. The other part is often a thinly veiled effort to CRUSH the remaining employees, to replace full time workers with temp workers or offshore workers with lower pay and lower or no benefits. Sometimes Big Tech workers are being laid off and then offered the chance to come back at lower pay. Many observers feel that layoffs are also used as a weapon to fight efforts of tech workers to unionize.
There are also other ways that firms attempt to mask their intentions. They may offer so-called voluntary exit plans and early retirement packages. Of course, the waves of layoffs will likely follow anyway. Meanwhile, firms tout claims that large percentages of their software code are now written by AI, or even that non-technical employees are using AI to generate production code — there have already been well documented instances where this resulted in buggy code that caused all sorts of problems, even as the firms keep shoving shoddy AI systems onto users who increasingly don’t want to have anything to do with AI systems at all, for the many reasons we’ve discussed in the past.
The upshot is that employee morale at many of these firms is HORRENDOUS and getting worse. Many employees who haven’t been laid off yet are worried that they may be management’s next target to be pushed out the door, which certainly doesn’t create a good work environment — what it does create is a vicious circle of FEAR. In some cases, management seems to be going out of its way to upset remaining employees with intrusive activity monitoring and what many employees view as outright threats to their livelihoods.
For many years now, students were told that they needed to learn how to code, many schools made software coding a required component of their curriculums. Students were informed that this was the employment focus of the future, that they couldn’t risk being left behind. Now that’s all in the past. Many firms don’t want to hire entry level software engineers, which begs the question of where senior software engineers are going to come from, as the quality of the systems we depend on continues descending into a putrid pile of AI Slop.
Because ultimately, almost all of us are the losers. The users of these systems, the employees being laid off — everyone that is except the private jet and big yachts class at the top ordering the layoffs.
Stock prices may be artificially boosted for now, but when the inevitable AI market crash comes the wails of despair will be very loud indeed. More than half a century ago, Rod Serling predicted the technological future of corporate greed and disrespect toward employees. Now our own present has proven him to have been all too correct.
–Lauren–