The Terror of the Great AI Displacement

The subtle fear in every worker and politician's mind

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”— Roy Batty

Introduction: It’s happening.

For years, and indeed, decades now, I’ve been hearing pitches from founders of productivity apps that claim to eliminate ‘unnecessary’ jobs.

They were early, but they were right.

It’s happening.

Investors in AI startups claim that job displacement won’t happen anytime soon, and that tens of millions of new jobs will emerge for those displaced.

Now, they can’t tell you what those jobs will be, but they’re sure they’re coming because, well, that’s what has always happened before.

Maximum truth seekers are few and far between when so many bags are available for collection, but I like to consider myself one of them.

In this series of essays on AI Job Displacement, I’m going to take you inside the debate that usually doesn’t leave the room where it happens.

Politicians, founders, CEOs and capital allocators are well aware of what’s happening, and they’re managing you. They’re managing the press, shareholders, and their own employees because they’re scared.

No one actually understands all the nuances of this timeline, but companies like Tesla, Microsoft and Amazon know the most – so we should study them and ignore the politicians they and the unions bought long ago.

The industry knows this time will be different or we wouldn’t be spending a trillion dollars on datacenters in five years to capture this opportunity.

Watch the checks technologists write, not the words coming out of our mouths.

Now, we can and will manage this transition, but it will not be easy. In Part Two we’ll discuss what you can do to survive the transition. In Part Three, we’ll talk about societal strategies, which are being drawn up but not spoken about.

I’m not a decel or a doomerist, I’m a realist – so let’s get real.

Part One: Amazon, is your Owl real?

Two categories of work represent 15% of the American workforce, and they’ll be eliminated over the next decade: factory & warehouse workers and drivers.

Amazon, Walmart, and Uber collectively employ almost four million workers (if you count freelance drivers).

We’ll talk about Amazon today, as it was forged in the furnaces of efficiency.

Getting packages to you in Amazon Prime-time does not happen naturally; it happens by relentlessly grinding employees, algorithms, robots and management to the bone.

Saruman took notes from Amazon when building his orc army at Isengard; that’s how ruthlessly efficient $AMZN is.

First, let’s look at the checks Amazon’s been writing:

1. Amazon acquired Canvas Technologies in 2019, which created an autonomous cart for warehouses.

2. By June 2025, Amazon deployed its one millionth robot in its warehouses.

   1. They’ve launched DeepFleet, an intelligent traffic management system that increases the speed of their robots by 10%.

3. Amazon acquired self-driving startup Zoox in 2020 for $1.2B.

   1. They’ve quietly invested billions into that startup, which has a purpose-built vehicle that looks exactly like a delivery truck with the driver compartment cut off and tossed into the scrap heap.

4. They’ve invested in the autonomous truck-driving system called Plus back in 2021 and placed an order for over 1,000 trucks.

5. In 2019, Rivian announced a $700M round led by Amazon and committed to ordering 100,000 electric delivery vans.

6. They’ve invested massively to lead in the drone delivery space, with a memorable 60 Minutes piece in 2013.

7. They attempted to buy the robotics company iRobot for $1.4B, but it eventually fell through in 2024, due to pressure from the European Union.

Second, let’s look at what they’ve been saying and doing:

1. Andy Jassy wrote a memo, out of the blue, on AI’s impact on June 17th, in which he warned,

   1. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

2. Amazon cut 30,000 employees last week.

3. Amazon has been relentlessly forcing a return to office, clearly the “gentleman’s riff” (a reduction in workforce by people opting out of coming back to work).

4. In a leaked memo, Amazon stated that it would eliminate 600,000 planned jobs in the coming years.

5. In the same memo, they began preparing a PR strategy that included donations to Toys for Tots in local communities, and hilariously, referred to robots as “cobots” (as in coworkers).

~9% of Americans work in factories and warehouses, and ~8% of the American labor force work as drivers.

Around 1% of employed Americans work at Amazon; it’s our country’s #2 employer

When Amazon makes these changes, they will force the country’s number one employer, Walmart, to do the same.

Millions of Americans from just these two companies alone will be living with the unrelenting anxiety that their bosses are eagerly waiting to replace them.

Now, Amazon isn’t a bad company; they are a ruthlessly efficient and competitive company.

Amazon is the best example of capitalism in human history: get anything you want, now.

The ‘anything’ and the ‘now’ can’t be underestimated in my previous sentence.

No human will touch your package (PAUSE) between the time you one-click and you, or your humanoid robot, unbox it.

I’m buying Amazon stock because its margins and growth in the coming years will be bonkers (not investing advice).

If you work at Amazon and fear for your job, the best thing you can do is to buy their stock and understand the rule of 4% – then join the FIRE movement (coming in part two in this series)

Best, JCal
If you reply, I’ll write more.

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