Fear of AI is at an all-time high. Not fear of a Skynet-style superintelligent singularity seizing power, generally speaking, but of something perhaps just as horrifying: that life under capitalism continues much as it always has, with one key difference — AI has made human labor obsolete.
A new survey by consulting firm Mercer polled nearly 1,000 executives across the United States. A jaw-dropped 98 percent of them said they have major organization design changes in the works around AI, while 99 percent expect AI will lead to layoffs over the next two years.
The Mercer report, first covered by TechSpot, also found a collapse in worker wellbeing as talk of AI dominates break rooms. In 2024, Mercer worker’s sentiment found 66 percent of employees surveyed said they are “thriving” in the workplace. By 2026, that number had fallen to just 44 percent.
At the same time, the number of workers who report being “unsatisfied” has skyrocketed, with over 20 percent of workers surveyed admitting they’re “unsatisfied but… don’t have a choice at this point and will be staying for the next 12 months.”
How human resources managers plan to combat this workplace fatigue — symptomatic of a rapidly decaying labor market, not to mention stagnant wages across the board — is equally alarming. In the next two years, 49 percent of HR professionals say incorporating worker sentiments with behavioral data will become “critical” to managing labor on the job. A further 44 and 43 percent said the same of always-on surveillance platforms and AI chatbots, respectively.
To the business owners and corporatists of the world, this is the point of AI: to discipline human labor. That’s the large-scale economic process by which capitalists undermine workers’ bargaining power, through systemic mechanisms like debt, the so-called gig economy, unemployment, deskilling — and, according to some theorists, even the nuclear family.
In the workplace and outside of it, AI boosts these mechanisms, eroding workers’ power to demand change or even hold onto basic concessions like healthcare and pensions — labor rights begrudgingly pried from corporations after decades of workplace struggle.
The technology doesn’t even need to be particularly effective to achieve any of this. Business leaders like Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke are already using AI to squeeze more value from their workers, while venture capitalists use it to pry equity back from theirs. In some cases, managers are even using AI chatbots to decide who to fire.
In all, the picture is pretty grim. The richest men and women in the world have made it abundantly clear why they want AI. The tech may not be living up to their wild expectations quite yet, but they’re still unleashing it without hesitation. The only question is how workers respond now, before that hellish dystopia we all fear becomes our reality.
More on labor: Large Study Finds That Replacing Workers With AI Is Backfiring Badly
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