Laid-Off Professionals Are Training the AI That Replaced Them

What distinguishes this moment from earlier automation waves is the directness of the knowledge transfer. In prior cycles, automation replaced physical or routine cognitive tasks — the expertise of the displaced worker was not itself the raw material of the replacement system. Here, it is. The in May 2026 made the sequence explicit: employees completed internal AI training assignments and were then terminated, compressing what had previously been a diffuse multi-year displacement into a single, legible transaction.