"It's like celebrating your own funeral"

Marcus was a software engineer at Salesforce. He built with his own hands the tools that would eventually replace him.

During a Zoom meeting, his boss was boasting about the AI system's efficiency. Halfway through, Marcus noticed the numbers popping up on screen — 262 colleagues were being terminated right then. "It's like celebrating your own funeral."

He stared at the whiteboard full of formulas that suddenly meant nothing. "AI is smart, but it's cold. You can't hug an algorithm. You can't plead with a machine. But your life depends on it."

From then on, every day at work became an invisible race: every task, he asked himself — can an algorithm do this faster? Better? Cheaper? More and more often, the answer was "yes."