Jenna Li was a project manager at Google for years. She spent months teaching machines how to do her job — optimizing workflows, predicting edge cases, building knowledge systems. The AI absorbed all the experience she had accumulated over years, in just weeks. Then a Slack message ended her career.
"I helped train the AI systems that are now replacing me. No meeting, no goodbye — just one Slack message buried in dozens of notifications."
She laughed when she said it — the kind of laugh that isn't funny. "When progress hits your career, it feels too personal."
She once thought she was building irreplaceable institutional knowledge. But AI doesn't need promotions, doesn't take vacations, doesn't make mistakes — it just learns, executes, replaces.