There has been a conspicuous number of high profile lay-off announcements lately, and journalists have been busy looking at them from one angle or the other. Two related points dominate the coverage: AI and the young. The fact that big tech companies (namely Amazon and Meta) are among the companies announcing lay-offs, it is argued, makes the job losses more ominous — a glimpse of the econo-technological future. “Those big technology companies are earlier adopters [of AI] so we are likely to see the impact there first,” said one source in the FT story. Second, young people are said to be getting the worst of it, possibly because entry-level jobs are the easiest for AI to replace (a very good story in the Wall Street Journal went into this aspect in detail).