Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product.
Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They literally sat in rooms teaching the system their jobs, then got the severance email.
The jobs opening up aren’t for the people being let go. Customer support, QA, and content moderation are gone. ML engineers are in shortage. Nobody’s running a retraining bridge. Coinbase is rebranding its managers as “player-coaches.” The workers who built these companies are being edged to the margins while the profits from their labor go into server farms they’ll never see.