We Automated the Easy Part. The Hard Part Would Like a Word.

The tech industry is in the middle of something that sounds complicated but isn't, once you find the right analogy. Here's my attempt at one... Consider a restaurant. For years, this restaurant employed people to answer the phone, take reservations, process payments, and occasionally locate a child who had wandered into the kitchen. Then the owner, in a moment of what felt very much like genius, installed apps and kiosks to handle all of it. The staff were let go. Costs dropped. Quarterly numbers looked tremendous. The kiosk, for its part, did its best. It suggested the lobster bisque to a man who'd come in specifically to complain about the lobster bisque. It processed seventeen orders of "the usual" from people who had never been there before. When a customer typed "no onions," it printed the ticket, added a small digital checkmark, and put onions on. The cooks and managers, meanwhile, became more important than ever. The problems they were solving had simply gotten stranger. That is the tech industry in 2026. The jobs being eliminated are the ones AI can handle passably: basic coding tasks, routine bug testing, coordinating meetings about meetings. The jobs being created are the ones where passably is a disaster waiting to be formally investigated. Designing systems that hold together under pressure. Making sure AI doesn't do something technically logical and completely catastrophic. Keeping the vast, humming, invisible machinery of the internet running in a world that depends on it absolutely and thinks about it almost never, right up until it stops. The people being let go are largely not the people being hired. They just happen to work in the same industry, in the same buildings, at the same kinds of desks. Which is, when you think about it, a distinction that deserves more than a paragraph in a press release.