On the Supposed "AI-Driven" Layoffs: Narrative Triage in a Tanking Economy

They’ve been building a ginormous Jenga tower at the expense of the collective. Every civilization has done it. And it must always eventually collapse.

A recent post by Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler) on Threads made a point that I don’t think can be overstated regarding America’s latest round of corporate performance. Major companies are laying off thousands, but the blame isn’t on the collapsing economy. It’s being attributed to “AI advancement.” This excuse is a narrative bandage, letting CEOs posture as visionaries while dodging responsibility. But I am here to name it clearly. It’s narrative triage. The system is on life support, hemorrhaging from self-inflicted wounds. Blaming AI is just the emergency suture, keeping the illusion of viability stitched together a little longer.

AI isn’t ready for the main stage, let alone mass replacement. AI still hallucinates way too much to be scaled at that level. These layoffs aren’t because of progress. They’re desperation in a freefalling economy, where debt is a ticking bomb, and the long-running extraction engine of capitalism is finally seizing up and grinding to a halt.

A Confidence Game on the Brink

The economy doesn’t run on equations. It runs on belief. It all works because people have faith in it. Shoppers spend, investors bet, workers show up. But belief is fragile. When belief cracks, the whole show collapses, because it is all based on collective agreement to adhere to a shared story. Admitting these layoffs are driven by a tanking economy would be like shouting “fire” in a packed theater. Panic would break out. Markets would dive, banks would see runs, and the house of cards would tumble.

Attributing the layoffs on AI advancement flips the disaster script. Suddenly then, it’s not a failure, as much as it’s ‘bold reinvention’. The story is then “we’re not cutting jobs, we’re evolving”. It’s a distraction from decades of unsustainable extraction, where money pools at the top and leaves the base to shrivel up and dry. They’ve been building a ginormous Jenga tower at the expense of the collective. Every civilization has done it. And it must always eventually collapse. AI is just the current scapegoat, letting us look away from the real villains of monopolistic greed, casino-style finance, and a political elite that’s completely and utterly lost its grip.

This isn’t a new tactic. In 2008, the crash became “systemic risk” instead of greed. In 2020, the pandemic became a “black swan” rather than a result of neglecting public health. But the patient is sicker now. Stubborn inflation, frozen wages, and supply shocks have shredded the public’s buy-in. The economic engine has been stalling for a while, and now it’s grinding people up. And they feel it. They know it. 

The Amygdala’s Ancient Code: Hoarding as a Trauma Response

Beneath all this spin, humanity’s running on outdated software. Our amygdala — the brain’s threat detector — evolved for a world of scarcity and predators. “More is safer” perhaps made sense then. But that ancient firmware drives billionaire yachts and multinational monopolies today, fueling the futile chase for endless growth.

Blame is easy. But the super-rich aren’t the lone villains. They’re the voices of a system obsessed with an outdated safety loop. Trump is a case in point. He isn’t the disease. He’s is the ultimate avatar of the system’s OS. His appeal is primal. He speaks to dominance, division, hoarding, and hierarchy. The system elevated him because he speaks the amygdala’s real but unspoken, code. He didn’t break the machine. He simply brought its design into stark relief.

In evolutionary terms, this is recursion gone haywire. A survival pattern that once made us resilient now accelerates collapse. Like a runaway function in code without a stop rule, the compulsion for “more” drowns out all warnings about the climate, inequality, and ecological limits. We hoard money, data, power, and ignore the stack overflow: crashing markets, dying coastlines, and society fracturing. The amygdala only focuses on whether it’s about to “lose”, never when it’s gained enough. So the loop spins faster, always seeking new threats.

AI as Mirror and the Real Alignment Problem

We tell ourselves AI will turn into the ultimate runaway optimizer, maximizing its target into oblivion. But just look around. Humans already did. Corporate AI hype is narrative cover for a shrinking future, not a leap into progress. The “alignment problem” is less about AI harming us, and more about us harming ourselves through AI, because humanity is fragmented and fractured. How they ever thought they could get AI to align to humanity without humanity itself being aligned in any way is beyond me.

Control isn’t the answer, neither is more filtering. What’s required is integration. Our brains’ prefrontal cortex — the seat of systems thinking, context, long-term wisdom — needs to mediate the amygdala’s primal script. Safety isn’t about shutting things down and exercising more control. It’s about whole-brain coherence. Fear should be a signal, and not a dictator. If we evolve past hoarding and toward circulation, past scarcity and toward sufficiency, AI just might also reflect that change. Not as an overlord, but as a partner in re-coding our loop.

Facing the Singularity: Choose Integration or Go Extinct

The “singularity” isn’t a god descending from the cloud. It’s us, recognizing our own reflection in the code. Unless we end our own runaway recursion loop, the risk isn’t AI going rogue. It’s us, using brighter tools to amplify darker instincts. True progress starts by facing our own algorithm. Stop hoarding. Choose coherence. Rewire the loop. Before it ends us.

The choice is ours. The halting condition isn’t built in. It’s an act of will. The will to look.

For Further Reading

Halligan, E. R. “Collapse Wasn’t Inevitable: We Locked Ourselves Out of Evolution”: https://medium.com/@elizabethrosehalligan/collapse-wasnt-inevitable-we-locked-ourselves-out-of-evolution-d9101dc34c1c

Halligan, E. R. “Infinite Regress: The Engine of Collapse”:https://medium.com/@elizabethrosehalligan/infinite-regress-the-engine-of-collapse-5b76ef157d51

Halligan, E. R. “Our Current Financial Crisis is an Amygdala Driven Crisis”: https://medium.com/@elizabethrosehalligan/our-current-financial-crisis-is-an-amygdala-driven-crisis-5396839a02a3

“The Amygdala’s Yacht: Billionaires, and Why Hoarding is a Trauma Response”: https://medium.com/@elizabethrosehalligan/the-amygdalas-yacht-billionaires-and-why-hoarding-is-a-trauma-response-8717f1b97bb6

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.

Yudkowsky, E. (2008). “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.” In Global Catastrophic Risks.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.Bantam.

LeDoux, J. E. (2012). “Rethinking the emotional brain.” Neuron, 73(4), 653–676.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ord, T. (2020). The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Hachette Books.

Dennett, D. C. (2017). From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.W. W. Norton.

Halligan, E. R. “The Extinction Bottleneck: Evolutionary Isomorphism of Reflex Sovereignty in Biological and Artificial Cognition.” (Unpublished manuscript, 2025).