The AI Lies We Peddle. What gives?

I’m angry at the lies I see about the forced optimism and the promise of AI to society.

We tell ourselves: AI won’t steal your job. AI will just make it easier.
But people see what’s really happening.

Companies are scaling back hiring, routing tasks to machines, and rewarding employees for AI utilization. “This is only here to support you. This will help you save time, focus on the creative, and let the system handle the repetitive tasks”.

All the while new reports of lay-offs without plans to ever refill those roles. And companies not hiring young talent anymore.

The workforce lucky enough to keep their jobs? They are training AI, fixing its mistakes, and showing it how to handle both the simple tasks and the more complex ones. And yes, over time, the errors will shrink. The machine will get sharper. And soon, the truth was impossible to ignore. The AI will the job well enough to replace many of us.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: this is the future people are sensing.

It’s in our DNA. Our ancestors faced this:
One of the parroted promises of the Industrial Revolution was time back for the people. Yes, we started moving from 16 hours workdays to 8 hours workdays. In 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d soon have 15 hour workweek. Weeks, not days. The logic was simple and made sense then: productivity would rise, people would make much more money for the same amount of effort, and so people would have extra time off. To explore themselves, get creative, yada yada.

In truth, in the shift towards industrialization, there were waves of concentrated unemployment. Towns collapsed. Homelessness sky rocketed. Factories started using women and children as cheaper labor. Existing labor had erratic labor hours. Firing at will. And it became a cycle. The mid-1800s saw cycles after cycles of mass unemployment. Yes, a new economy ultimately emerged but millions of lives were lost. Families upon families were devastated, as income inequality widened. And we are still living the delicate nature of our economy, bubbles ready to burst.

Automation created wealth. Yes. It also created mass unemployment. There were little to no societal supports (e.g., pensions, unemployment benefits, food aid). And so those with the wealth were easily able to dominate the unemployed.

In a way, the workhorse did go down. But people weren’t being creative during those hours. They were hungry, struggling, angry, in deep despair.

The body keeps a score. We remember what happened.

It’s easier to say “people hate change” than to admit they’re grieving loss. People aren’t resisting innovation. They’re resisting invisibility. They don’t trust that leadership will have their back as AI automation scales. That’s the real adaptive challenge: not tool adoption, but trust reconstruction.

Without a bold people strategy for the age of AI, organizations will default to fear, short-term control, and PR optimism as tactics for productivity and profitability.