Three years ago, somebody asked me if I really thought this AI thing was going to be the future. My answer: I don’t even think this is the future. I think this is the right now. Everybody is just going to wake up to it at their own rate. And Everybody’s Having Their Own AI Moment Right Now.

The Layoffs Are Real. The Reasoning Is Often Fiction.

Companies figured out that “AI did it” sounds better. Klarna’s CEO famously bragged that AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents, then later walked it back: “We have made 0 layoffs due to AI.” Salesforce cut 4,000 support roles citing AI, then a spokesperson admitted they had actually “redeployed hundreds of employees into other areas.”

Oxford Economics ran the numbers and found that while AI was cited in nearly 55,000 U.S. job cuts in the first eleven months of 2025, that’s only 4.5% of total reported job losses. Standard “market and economic conditions” accounted for four times that figure. Oxford’s verdict: “We suspect some firms are trying to dress up layoffs as a good news story rather than bad news, such as past over-hiring.”

The job losses are real. The narrative is often spin.

Meanwhile, You’re Training Your Replacement

While some workers are being fired with AI as the excuse, others are being asked to train the AI that might come for them next. Meta announced last week that it’s installing tracking software on U.S. employees’ work computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots. The data feeds the company’s AI training pipeline. The explicit goal, per the internal memo: build agents capable of performing white-collar tasks on their own.

Meta told its own staff they can “do their part to help by just doing their daily work.” Yale law professor Ifeoma Ajunwa told Reuters that “there is no limit on worker surveillance” in the U.S. at the federal level.

Again, not to beat my drum too loudly, but legislation, anyone?

The Bernie Sanders Moment

Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders sat down with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot in a dark room with ominous music and asked it about the dangers of AI. The video pulled 2.6 million views on YouTube. The chatbot agreed with everything Sanders implied. “Money, senator. It’s fundamentally about profit,” Claude said.

The internet roasted it, because chatbots are designed to mirror their interrogators. We covered this in °FAI: AI Is Not Your Friend two weeks ago, sycophancy is the central design flaw of these systems. The dread in that room, the sense that something enormous is rolling toward us with no brakes, that part is real. It’s not Sanders’s fabrication. It’s the country.

Nobody Is Riding This at the Same Speed

In past technological shifts, an older generation could usually say “I remember when this happened before.” This time, no one can.

A Frontiers in Psychiatry study of 1,151 adults across age groups found that AI anxiety doesn’t break along the typical generational lines at all. The researchers concluded that AI’s spread “has rendered direct exposure nearly universal, potentially equalizing emotional reactions across generations.”

The 2026 Gallup-Walton “AI Paradox” report found that even among Gen Z, the supposedly AI-native cohort, excitement dropped 14 percentage points year-over-year, hopefulness fell 9 points, and anger rose 9 points. Anxiety held steady at 42%. Among Gen Z adults specifically, that figure is 53%.

Everybody is feeling it. Almost nobody knows what to do with it.

And No One Is Steering the Ship

There is no comprehensive federal AI law. Per Baker Botts’s 2026 regulatory analysis, the only standalone federal AI statute on the books is the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which addresses AI-generated non-consensual imagery. That’s the entire federal framework.

States have scrambled to fill the void. California, Texas, Colorado, and Illinois all have AI laws taking effect this year. But the December 2025 Executive Order signals federal preemption is coming, and a White House AI Litigation Task Force has been established specifically to challenge state AI laws in court, as we have discussed before.

Meanwhile, Apple, Microsoft, and Google are baking generative AI directly into their operating systems. Our phones, our work computers, our default search experiences. Opting out isn’t really part of the deal anymore.

The Wild Part

This isn’t us getting something different in our lives. This is permeating every part of every life, in every direction, mostly without our consent. Three years ago I said this wasn’t the future, this was the right now. The waking-up part is what’s happening this year, on a curve none of us are riding at the same speed.

I don’t know how this levels out. I don’t think anybody does. It’s going to be wild for a while.

Categories: °FAI, AI, Ethics