AI Job Grief: The Unnamed Psychological Crisis Hitting Tech Workers

I am probably different to most people, but I always have trouble understanding why people want to have jobs so much. The obvious and direct answer immediately of course is "to be able to pay the bills".

But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.

But the answer to that in my view is that we should rather do work to be able reach a society where this value will be shared, and not rely on "jobs" being the key thing ultimately.

If I could choose, I would rather not work, and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life. Also what is the point of doing the same jobs generation after generation? Most of the jobs in modern world aren't really what fit our evolutionary primitive desires in the first place, and it's forced stress.

Quotes from the article:

'Work as Identity: The Foundation'

Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'

Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.

Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:

"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."

I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.

I've been calling it Deep Blue: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/

I do believe there's going to be a lot of left-behinds, as a sort-of digital rust belt. Even though, as an industry, we've always been in the business of automating and replacing ourselves, the shift will hit too quick.

I lay none of the blame on AI the technology, and all the blame on AI as a mindset and excuse.

Layoffs are not due to AI, but it's a convenient excuse: "more productive, don't need people, we're firing on all cylinders and yeah, firing 20% of the workforce while we're at it". Everything else being equal, the "more productive so we earn 20%" counterfactual makes more sense - but of course, not everything else is equal.

Treadmill speed will increase, no doubt. We haven't lowered working hours from 40 to 20 when computers 2x'd us all, we for sure won't lower them now.

We'll manage the nondeterministic imperfections, but boy, will there be bumps on the road.

What I fear most: AI will give us all more power. This includes profitmaxxing no-holds-barred corpos, from preseed startups hustling 996-style to big multinacionals. Even now, with locked-down devices and subscriptions for everything and owning things replaced with "owning a limited nontransferrable revokable end-user license", it's not good. AI is going to multiply that.

Damn, now I need a drink.

Good grief!

Programmers are more impacted now than manufacturing were because they identify with work?

The better prior is when manufacturing or office workers had to take on the job of outsourcing or automating away the work of others, because it highlights the guilt of knowing that it's not good for others, but it's temporarily good for you. Normally we try to expand our concern to our neighbor, but sometimes we have to put on the blinders. It's not fun to pull up the ladder you climbed.

The sweet spot of delivering productivity enhancement is when something that was previously too costly now becomes economically feasible -- so you're helping new products/services. It's doubly good because you're not just working/extracting on a value stream, you're creating a new one. Best to aim for that.

There is a name for it, it’s called an “existential crisis.”

"A separate strand of research frames resistance to AI itself as an identity-protective response, where workers push back against the technology because it threatens how they understand who they are."

Great read.

I'm sure people are sad about a changing relationship to their craft, but make no mistake, the biggest sadness people are experiencing in and out of tech is not having a place in society.

Framing the job losses and anxiety as grief is counterproductive. It makes for a longer article because you can shoehorn everything in the infamous and frankly ridiculous "five stages" meme.

The article does push back occasionally, but ends with the students booing Schmidt interpreted as expressing "their grief".

No! That is harmful propaganda. They were expressing their agency and anger at someone who worked 6 years as a programmer, screwed up the Lex rewrite, went straight into management at Sun in 1983 and later moved on to Google.

Now he is rich, can escape to Cyprus any time and lectures the young about where programming is going. How would Schmidt with his buggy Lex know what being a programmer is?

You need more anger, not this grief nonsense that is just designed to weaken you.

>>> For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait.

Total BS. Top-to-bottom offensive, elitist junk masquerading as logic. Written by someone who has never spent an afternoon with a farmer, with a cop, with a fisherman, a professional musician, a pilot or any manner of soldier. Some professions dictate one's entire life. Software engineer is not one of them.

You can be a software engineer 9 to 5 and be something else on weekends. Ask a farmer what they do on weekends. 99 time out of 100 it will be something on a farm. Ask a pilot and they will ask which hotel they are staying in and when thier next flight is schedualed. Ask a soldier and the will ask whether they are on recall. Some professions have days off, others do not. Those are the ones that define a person's life and personality.

How utterly pointless.

AI slop posing as “commentary” on the AI crisis.

Stop trying to demoralize us.

During Covid, we, the intellectual class, spent our year lamenting, explaining, meme-Ing, about what a change it was. Meanwhile, every day, billions of poorer people got up and went to their jobs as normal. I’m in lockdown and Grace, the grocery store clerk, is going to work just like any other day, just in a mask.

We’re up in arms about AI. We’re asking what does a future where AI can do all the work look like. Where fantasizing about the end of capitalism or fearing the dark futures.

We believe that our jobs matter. That the destruction of our jobs will start a revolution. That we matter.

AI grief is our class realizing that our future is that of those grocery store clerks, and that we did nothing for grocery store clerks when we had money and influence, and no one will do anything for us.

Elysium is the future, not Star Trek.

AI should be only used for activities that Humans can't do. Replacing humans just for reducing cost should be illegal. In fact we should make LLM use illegal for everything that is not at the forefront of scientific / math discoveries.

The underlying issue here is the same as why I am generally opposed to large governments, entitlement programs, etc.

In the case of jobs, we are already overly dependent on individual incomes just to get by. We've collectively outsourced nearly everything a person needs to actually survive, choosing to pay for everything rather than know how to do it ourselves or go without. A tiny fraction of people today are involved in food production, and most of us don't know how the food is produced, processed, or stored. We don't know how to make our own cloths, fix an electrical or plumbing issue in our own home, or maintain our own vehicles yet we depend on all of these.

Insurance programs are much the same, though when those leave you high and dry its generally much more impactful than when you can't get a toilet fixed in short order. To their credit, some Democrats tried to warn us of the risks of tying health care to jobs and many Democrats tried to design a better system even if they didn't or couldn't explain the risks necessitating it. Now the tech industry is feeling the pain of all this centralization and dependence.

The story this article begins with is tragic, though the fact that we collectively are okay with, and even feel entitled to, being so dependent on various insurance programs is similarly tragic in my opinion.

We need to change the core of what our systems are based on today for any meaning, long lasting change to happen. We can keep duct taping the tears along the edges but it will continue to fail, and usually the failures become more painful and more frequent when we just look for more quick fixes.