The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
AI HAS STARTED A LAYOFF RACE.
Okay. I’ve been quiet about the AI madness for a while.
Watching.
Listening.
Trying to separate the loudest opinions from what is actually happening.
I’m ready to talk about it.
This is the first post in a series.
No hype.
No “AI will save us.”
No “AI will destroy humanity.”
Just a closer look at the incentives already shaping the market.
A paper by two economists argues that AI can trigger a layoff race.
Here’s the nightmare in plain English:
One company replaces people with AI.
Costs go down.
Investors clap.
Competitors panic.
Nobody wants to be the last business paying a “bloated” payroll while everyone else cuts costs.
So they do it too.
Then the people who lost their jobs have less money to spend.
They buy less.
Demand falls.
Sales drop — not only for the company that fired them, but for everyone.
And what do businesses do when demand drops?
They cut more people.
Every company can say: “We had to. Everyone else was doing it.”
Individually, that decision may be rational.
Collectively, it is a disaster.
Cheaper products sound great — until fewer people can afford to buy them.
That is the trap.
The authors call it a prisoner’s dilemma. Firms capture the savings from automation, while the damage to demand gets spread across the whole market.
Their solution? A tax on automation that replaces workers — not to punish useful AI, but to stop companies from outsourcing the cost of layoffs to everyone else.
Sounds dramatic?
Maybe.
But the next question is more important:
Is this actually what is happening right now?
In the next posts, we’ll look at the market without the AI fever: jobs, money, data, energy — and the parts nobody puts in the pitch deck.
So, freelancers: scared yet?
Sources for this post:
Transparency note:
Written by a human.
Translated from Russian to English with GPT.
GPT’s output, facts, and sources were reviewed by a human.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Trending
retrofuturism
Share your favorite designs from the past exploring the distant future. Or your own take on the aesthetic 🚀
halftone
Dots. Texture. Grain. Let's see your designs using the halftone technique.
Midjourney
Creatives are showing off what they're making with Midjourney.
colorgrade
Video editors sound off: How do you enhance the mood of your video in color grading?
Related posts
How do you keep a brand's promise of calm intact once real users start clicking through checkout?
Mudita builds minimalist devices around one idea: technology that harmonizes with your life instead of competing for your attention. The brandbook lays that promise out in detail - tone, restraint, what the brand should never feel like. My job was carrying that same discipline into the product itself.
I worked across the checkout flow, the storefront and category browsing, and the product page above the fold - three surfaces where small frictions had quietly built up against the brand's own case for calm. The brandbook gave the rules. The UI work was making sure those rules survived contact with a real cart and a real user.
For the case study visuals, I used AI for the first time to produce product footage 🤖 - wind moving through a scene, an object drifting in place. Higgsfield was genuinely a good way to learn that workflow fast.
Full case study - actual before/after breakdowns - is up on Behance 🔗, linked below.
Genuinely curious where people land on this: generating production assets with AI is fast, and honestly kind of fun as a workflow - but there's real pushback that it's taking work away from people who used to shoot this stuff. Where do you fall on that?
The checkout flow detail is what stands out to me, that's usually where a brand's calm promise turns into three different button behaviors fighting each other. On your AI question, I think it matters less whether it's fast and more who's checking the output against the brand's...
What if your business could just… run?
New leads.
New emails.
Follow-ups.
Tasks.
Attendance.
Payroll.
Reports.
The problem isn't that your team can't handle the work.
It's that your team shouldn't have to handle all of it manually.
At MaVionix India Private Limited, we build AI-powered solutions and intelligent automation that connect the moving parts of a business—so repetitive work runs in the background while your team focuses on what actually moves the business forward.
Less busy work. More possibility.
This is what smarter business operations look like.
And we're just getting started.
Have a process that feels unnecessarily complicated? Let's talk.
#AI #Automation #BusinessAutomation #DigitalTransformation #AIForBusiness #SaaS #FutureOfWork #BusinessTechnology #MaVionix
a teaser at a fictional AI chatbot. thoughts & feelings? what else would you like to know as a potential, conceptual consumer? hit me with your best shot!
i'm looking to complete this little 'preview' for presentation come friday afternoon.
Cool work!