The sweeping integration of artificial intelligence into the productive fabric is breeding a major economic contradiction. Replacing the workforce with algorithmic systems optimizes margins in the short term, but it simultaneously dries up the incomes needed to sustain aggregate consumption.
1 Big Tech's great social turn
Early 2026 marks a structural turning point for tech employment.
Jobs shock
A historic wave of restructuring
A brutal contraction is hitting the sector's leading multinationals. It is almost systematically blamed on the surging operational capabilities of AI. Yet economic analysis reveals a more complex underlying mechanism, one that calls into question the very balance between technological supply and consumer demand.
Amazon
~30,000
Positions earmarked for elimination.
Tech sector total
80,000+
Skilled jobs destroyed in the first months of 2026.
Also affected
Oracle · Meta
Large-scale headcount adjustments.
Stated cause
AI
Surging operational capabilities.
2 The demand paradox
Or the "phantom productivity gain": a systemic flaw in extreme rationalization.
Macroeconomic theory
When supply races ahead and demand dies out
By swapping a high-performing AI for its employees, a company sees its fixed costs collapse and its operating margin surge. But at the aggregate level, that same process strips individuals of their incomes. This is the paradox's central asymmetry.
The mechanism
An ultra-powerful supply-side economy faces a bloodless demand-side economy. Shrinking the aggregate wage bill contracts sales volumes; to preserve profitability in the face of falling demand, firms automate further, deepening the shortfall of solvent consumers. The system locks into a deflationary spiral.
3 "AI washing," or the weaponizing of progress
A modernist narrative dressing up management decisions that are far less avowable.
Narrative & markets
Progress as an alibi
Modeled on greenwashing, "AI washing" invokes an inevitable technological transition to mask less presentable realities: a structural slowdown in the market, internal strategic blunders. Technical progress is used to legitimize the sacrifice of a company's lifeblood, its workforce.
Technical progress is instrumentalized to legitimize sacrificing the very workforce that, at the end of the chain, keeps the consumption system alive.
Profitable short term, a dead end long term
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Immediate market effect: the projected jump in profitability excites shareholders and triggers an artificial rise in share prices.
⏳
Short-termism: profitability is inflated by falling costs, not by rising demand.
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Systemic wall: capitalism cannot survive without solvent buyers. The dead end is structural.
4 Redefining value: universal basic income and individual shifts
The question is no longer whether AI can replace humans, but how to keep citizens solvent.
Ways out of the crisis
Sustaining solvency, not just jobs
In a world without mass employment, preserving demand becomes the central issue. Universal basic income then stops being a philosophical utopia and becomes a tool of macroeconomic stabilization. At the individual level, the transition forces a profound shift in what it means to be a worker.
Three levers for the transition
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Universal basic income: a stabilization necessity to support aggregate demand, more than a moral debate.
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Entrepreneurship: as mid-level salaried jobs vanish, building one's own venture becomes a central path again.
🎨
Artistic expression: one of the few strongholds where human singularity keeps an irreducible value against the algorithm.