In February 2026, a single product announcement from an AI company in San Francisco triggered a six percent crash in India's technology sector index. Eighty thousand workers had already been laid off. Fresher hiring had collapsed seventy-five percent. In Portland, an illustrator who once invoiced seventy-seven assignments a year was down to twenty-two. In Louisville, a coding bootcamp was closing its doors because the jobs it trained people for were vanishing. In Nairobi, content moderators who had trained the AI safety systems were being replaced by those same systems.

The displacement was real. It was also, according to the data, exaggerated. Sixty percent of companies cut workers in anticipation of AI's potential. Only two percent did so based on its actual performance. The gap between the promise and the reality, between the corporate narrative and the lived experience, between the macro calm and the micro storm, is the subject of this episode.

Featuring the Indian IT services industry in crisis, freelance illustrators watching their livelihoods compress, bootcamp graduates entering a job market that no longer wants them, content moderators in Nairobi replaced by the systems they trained, and the McKinsey projections, MIT studies, and World Economic Forum forecasts that everyone cites and no one agrees on.

Part of a series that includes episodes on AI technology, the future of capitalism, and communism's structural failure. Where those episodes examined systems, this one examines the people inside those systems when the systems start needing fewer of them.

HOW THIS WAS MADE: This is an AI-assisted podcast. Research was conducted using a multi-model pipeline: Claude Opus (primary synthesis and narrative), ChatGPT Pro (deep research and source verification), and Grok (X/social media intelligence and real-time discourse analysis). Human editorial direction at every stage — topic selection, directing research queries, fact verification, narrative structure, and final review. Narrated using Kokoro text-to-speech.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for original reporting. The narrative uses composite characters constructed from documented experiences reported in journalism, surveys, and industry data. They represent patterns, not specific individuals, and are identified by the use of first names only. Every factual claim is drawn from documented sources. Where claims rest on contested estimates, the range of scholarly disagreement is noted. Facts were drawn from NASSCOM industry reports, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Society of Authors, MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, McKinsey Global Institute, World Economic Forum, Pew Research Center, and reporting from the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Economic Times.

Sources, citations, and full analysis at proxima.earth.