Amazon spent two years telling everyone that AI was the future and your job was the past. This week it laid off people inside its AGI unit — the actual team building the models that were supposedly going to replace you — while it keeps pouring $200 billion into the data centers those models live in. Read that twice. They kept the concrete and cut the brains. The engineers writing the thing that was going to make you obsolete just found out they were a cost center too.
This is where the whole pitch falls apart if you look at it straight. If the AI were really the point, you’d guard the people building it before anyone else. Instead Amazon has cut around 30,000 jobs since October, close to 10% of its corporate staff, and now it’s reaching into the one department it swears is the crown jewel. The tell is that $200 billion. That number doesn’t buy smarter AI so much as it buys buildings, chips, and a line on an earnings call that shareholders clap for. Workers are what you trim to make the spending look disciplined. The AGI team just learned what the warehouse learned three years ago: you’re a name until the spreadsheet wants a smaller one.
So the next time a CEO tells you the machine is coming for your job, remember what Amazon did to the people who built the machine. This was never about the technology being better than you — it’s about who gets paid and who gets cut, and that answer was locked in long before anyone learned to say “AGI.” The robot isn’t your enemy. The guy who decided the robot’s data center is worth $200 billion and your paycheck is worth zero — that’s your enemy. He’d cut the robot too the second the spreadsheet asked.