The World’s Last Jobs Fair
· Vice
This feature is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
James Hargreaves was a stout man from the Lancashire Valleys with a coarse beard and capable hands, who fed himself, his wife, and his 13 children by weaving. But unlike the other weavers, Hargreaves had an ace up his sleeve. He was an inventor, too. Indeed, this unassuming man, who lived and died during the Industrial Revolution, might rightly be dubbed “The Godfather of Automation.”
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As the late 18th-century English textile industry boomed all around him, Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, allowing weavers, for the first time, to work with multiple threads at once. Not that too many of them were in a rush to thank him. For Hargreaves, it was a life-defining “eureka” movement that would catalyze, in the short term, an era of automation that put tens of thousands out of work. It would also play some part in kickstarting the doomed search for ever-greater efficiency, productivity, and value delivery that still defines our workplaces today.
Almost two-and-a-half centuries later, artificial intelligence is being presented as the endpoint in this pursuit, heralded as such by an alliance of true believers, genuinely powerful tech-sector bosses, and those desperate to be on the right side of this so-called “revolution.” These forces are pushing hard for AI to be everywhere, especially at work.
Yet research shows that, as use of AI has ramped up, job markets have tanked. Everyone from consultants to copywriters to lawyers and whatever blue-collar jobs survived the raze of Thatcherism either have been or are expected to be negatively hit. Jettisoned workers must squint hard for silver linings. Perhaps they’ll take some solace in the suggestion that 95 percent of AI rollouts are failing to have a positive impact on the businesses that have deserted them.
Boosterish rhetoric extolling AI’s virtues continues to flow down from the top. On the global tech-conference circuit, those who stand to immediately win big from the rollout of AI take to brightly lit stages to gush about this value-delivering savior of the future to gatherings of On-Cloud-wearing, corporate-gilet-donning disciples.
“Sensing no critics in the room, one executive gushed about pumping more AI development cash through a known tax haven”
Carl Eschenbach is one such preacher. He’s CEO at Workday, a $56 billion software vendor that sells (increasingly) AI-powered technology to other businesses. During his keynote speech at the company’s two-day conference in Barcelona last November, Eschenbach strode back and forth across the stage with the zeal of a 1980s televangelist. He was there to spread the good word about how this incredible software might fix a world he sees as troubled by the sins of terrorism, war, and businesses not delivering quite enough value to their shareholders.
“AI will save us from drudgery,” he told his silent congregation of HR procurers, product managers, and consultants, some of whom were buried in their phones as he talked. “AI is helping us in fundamental ways we thought would never happen.”
Before Eschenbach took to the stage, a corporate video flashed across the big screen, demonstrating what workplaces in this utopian future might be like. Yuppies in pastel knitwear work in minimalist cafés, surrounded by AI-powered pop-ups helping them get their heads around profit margins and project flows. A permanent sunset shines through the windows and illuminates skyscrapers. “People get to do more of the work they love!” says a Xanax-happy voice-over. Tough luck, I guess, if you’ve already lost your work. No Heaven on Earth for you!
There were 300 sessions at the Workday conference, many of which centered on AI’s revolutionary impact—punters queued in droves to find out how a Spanish tourism business part-automated their recruitment process, or why JustEat, that well-known gig-economy employer (see: precarious workforce) is using AI to get deep under the skin of its staff. Sensing no critics in the room, one executive even gushed about the adrenalizing prospect of pumping more AI development cash through a known tax haven.
If abstract promises about value growth weren’t enough to win proletarian hearts and minds, there were also celebrities. A bored-looking Hannah Waddingham gamely shot the shit with a Workday executive, flashing a few withering smiles and bluffing her way through a series of questions. I’m not sure what she knows about AI but if there was a pay cheque, it was probably good. Maybe they’d be better off hiring AI Hannah Waddingham next time instead.
“One AI consultancy said that AI is ‘like electricity’ in its transformative potential”
Worried your livelihood is threatened by this technology? Don’t fret, the broad church of AI welcomes all into its flock. At the decidedly less glam Vilnius AI Summit in December, an ex-Hungarian Civil Servant fronted lessons on how to outsource communicating with coworkers to AI, while a guy who’d previously advised on how to outsource romance and dating to AI waxed lyrical about how automation could one day even replace the office cleaners.
A journalist contact, who for professional reasons had to spend their entire autumn at these conferences, told me that despite alarm bells signaling mass layoffs—not to mention ethical, legislative, and security concerns—there is “clear excitement” around AI “coming from the top [of businesses].” That’s unsurprising; CEOs are always searching for ways to cut costs. Recently, Klarna, which offers debt-trap credit to people buying trainers, dildos, and burgers on their iPhones, cut 40 percent of its workforce in favor of AI before having to U-turn (it turned out AI couldn’t quite do all the jobs humans once did after all).
Beyond the C-suite, HR managers, whose jobs are also threatened by AI, are among the key foot soldiers in the fight to implement it. I spoke to many HR workers while writing this piece, and the overriding sentiment was that they’re keen to remain as close to center stage as possible. Broadly speaking, they could see no huge benefits for them personally (some studies, they said, suggest a small wage boost). It’s more about keeping hold of whatever power they have now by showing they can do the dirty work of job cuts, pulling up the ladder while knowing the cliff edge it’s hanging from could collapse at any moment.
All in all, there’s a sense of “you’re either in on AI or you’re unemployed.”
“25 percent of workers are worried about AI replacing them”
For those in on it, it’s a world of apparent unending upside. One AI consultancy said that AI is “like electricity” in its transformative potential. Mega consultancy PwC claims that workers who get in on AI now will earn more, as well as earning their bosses more. A surefire way to keep that job! And The World Economic Forum predicts almost 100 million new jobs will be created (just ignore the part where 85 million get nixed, and the fact that unemployment is rocketing with no signs of those new jobs arriving anytime soon). 2025 Acas data shows 25 percent of workers are worried about AI replacing them, with one in six anxious that it will make work worse.
These fears aren’t without foundation. Multiple sources in the publishing industry explained that junior staff were automating their work because box-ticking middle managers were too busy trying to “find value” with AI to provide any guidance. The middle managers were then using AI tools to check the AI work the junior staff had sent because they didn’t have time to check it themselves. “It’s hardly ‘freeing people up from drudgery,’” they said, adding that the outcome will likely be a few senior staff managing AI programs that do everything.
This glum outlook might be on the money. Chekhov’s gun pertains to the idea that if a shooter is on a wall in a play, at some point it will have to be fired. Today, the gun on the office wall is AI. Vastly inflated tech-world values are based on it. Small-time chancers have already pivoted to it, and the corporate bureaucrat class jostle anew for primacy, aware that if they don’t, it might be their jobs on the chopping block. AI will be implemented, no matter what must be sacrificed. And if it doesn’t have value, as Chekhov’s principle suggests, then value will have to be found. The tech evangelists have dictated this, and our governments are with them.
I wonder if in some strange dream Hargreaves foresaw any of this, all those years ago? What would he advise the rest of us to do, those cast aside because the machine works harder, types quicker, thinks smarter? Who knows. Perhaps weaving will make a comeback.
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This feature is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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