AI Job Grief: The Unnamed Psychological Crisis Hitting Tech Workers

This article sums up much of what I have been feeling but can not yet express. He found the words I have been looking for. So many good quotes.

Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is a large part of the self rather than merely an activity. […] When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.

The relevant concept is disenfranchised grief […] for loss that is not acknowledged or socially supported […] “often because the loss does not conform to societal expectations of what should be mourned.” When a loss is not recognized by others, the grieving process stalls, and the grief stays “hidden and unresolved.” ¶ Tech layoffs are engineered to produce exactly this condition. They are framed as strategic pivots, restructurings, and efficiency measures. The language is designed to read as ordinary corporate hygiene, and it forecloses mourning by refusing to name a loss at all. There is no ritual for the end of a profession, no obituary for a career, and no socially sanctioned grief leave for the worker who has watched the meaning drain out of work that technically still pays.

He goes on to argue why this technological transition is different than others. The phrase we hear a bunch is that AI is bringing about “a new Industrial Revolution.” But what’s really different is the speed at which change is occurring.

Previous general-purpose technologies diffused across decades, which gave workforces time to retrain, to relocate, and to move children into different trades than their parents. The steam engine, electrification, and the personal computer each took a working generation or more to reshape the labor market, and the adjustment, however brutal, happened on a human timescale. The current automation of cognitive work is compressing that timeline toward a handful of years.

More interesting is the comparison of the work that was automated. Previously, as industrial work was replaced, the craft and the person were separate. “The welder is not the weld.” Well, in knowledge work, the designer or engineer has taken on what they make as part of their identity. The engineer is the code, the designer the designs.

But this statement hit the closest for me:

AI displacement does not offer a fixed endpoint. The process is ongoing and accelerating, with no stable post-AI equilibrium to adapt to. A worker who retrains into the safe role of this year may find that role automated within two years. There is no permanent absence to grieve, only a moving frontier. Workers are being asked to accept a process rather than an outcome, and the process keeps advancing.

The idea that our timeline is always advancing, that what we prepare for today might no longer be a thing tomorrow is what is the most exhausting. It is relentless. What we think today is uniquely human and irreplaceable, the next frontier model might redefine all of that.

Acceptance may be the wrong word for the AI grief model, because there is no settled loss to accept. The psychological task being demanded of workers is to sustain indefinite adaptation to a threat that never resolves. That is a different task, and no established cultural script exists for it.

Amen, brother.