Should workers be paying for the AI that will replace them?
Oracle is profitable and growing, yet it just laid off thousands more people to fund data centers built on borrowed money. If the AI buildout is being financed by cutting payroll before the machines can actually do those jobs, who should bear the cost of the transition: the workers, the shareholders, or the lenders?
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In today’s episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, dated September 15, 2026, the hosts dug into Oracle’s latest round of layoffs and found that the usual ‘AI took their jobs’ story doesn’t match the company’s own filings. Oracle is spending more on data centers each quarter than it collects in revenue, running billions in negative free cash flow, and trimming staff to service the debt, not because AI has replaced them yet. The episode frames this as anticipatory displacement, where the promise of automation, rather than automation itself, is what costs people their jobs. It also raises a harder question about whether an economy can bootstrap its way to abundance using the very workers it intends to make unnecessary. Give the episode a listen and tell us where you think the burden should fall.
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