February 13, 2026
Hypequake or nothingburger?
Why I'm not worried about AI job loss
Robots vs Paychecks: Panic, Pushback, and Pedants in the AI Job Wars
TLDR: A viral essay warned AI will crush jobs soon, but a rebuttal says calm down—no mass unemployment in sight. Commenters split between calling out hype, citing real layoffs from AI over-investment, and nitpicking the view count, turning a tech debate into a culture clash about fear, facts, and hype.
A viral AI doompost just blew up the internet, and the backlash is almost as big. After Matt Shumer’s essay claiming we’re in a “February 2020” moment—basically, brace for an AI avalanche—the counter-article says: relax, mass job loss isn’t coming. That’s when the comments turned into a street fight. One camp’s yelling “healthy fear”—as Flavius put it, “A healthy fear never killed anyone.” Others are rolling their eyes at the hype. Simonw called Shumer’s piece “slop-adjacent” and “not worth sharing”… while noting it racked up 80 million views. Irony? The internet has it.
Then the pedants arrived, armed with calculators. “100 million views?” scoffed RIMR. “That’s a weird way of saying 80 million.” Meanwhile, the sober crowd brought receipts: ddtaylor says replacing humans is harder than people think—“flipping burgers” is actually juggling many roles, and robots keep fumbling. But the plot twist came from nphardon, who says they’ve already seen brutal layoffs in semiconductors due to AI hype that produces no revenue. Translation: it’s not the robots; it’s the bubble.
So where are we? Somewhere between “the bots take all our jobs next Tuesday” and “nothing to see here.” The meme of the day: “avalanche” vs “nothingburger.” The community mood is split, snarky, and very online—and this debate is shaping how normal people think about work, money, and which AI to subscribe to.
Key Points
- •Matt Shumer’s essay “Something Big Is Happening” went viral on Twitter, reaching roughly 100 million views and was shared by figures across the political spectrum.
- •The essay compares AI’s rise to February 2020 before COVID’s exponential spread, warning of an imminent “avalanche” of change and job losses.
- •Shumer’s essay advises buying AI subscriptions, saving money, spending an hour daily experimenting with AI, and following him to track the best models.
- •The author states much of Shumer’s essay was AI-generated and argues its popularity stems from timing and positioning rather than substantive merit.
- •The article disputes forecasts of imminent mass unemployment or a pandemic-like shock, asserting AI’s impacts on ordinary jobs are unlikely to be sudden or catastrophic.