The author was a senior content strategist at a major media company until her role was eliminated last winter as the company restructured around AI tooling.

I write this six months after my role was eliminated. I have had time to reach the kind of considered position that the immediate aftermath did not allow. The broader public conversation about AI's effects on work gets some things right and some things wrong; the wrong things are the ones I would most like to address.

What the conversation gets right

The conversation gets right that the displacement is real, that the affected workers tend to be in defined occupational categories rather than spread evenly across the economy, and that the pace of the displacement has accelerated meaningfully over the past two years.

What it gets wrong

What it gets wrong is the framing of the affected workers as either victims or as inevitably re-skilled into new roles. The reality, in my experience and in the experience of my displaced colleagues, is more complicated. Some have re-skilled successfully into roles that genuinely benefit from the experience they bring; others have been pushed into roles that pay less and use less of their actual capability.

What helped

What helped me, specifically, was the time and resources to think carefully about what I actually wanted to do next. The severance the company provided supported the time; not all displaced workers in my category have access to comparable support.

What needs to be addressed

What needs to be addressed at the policy level is the support infrastructure for the displaced workers in the categories the displacement is now affecting. The infrastructure built for prior waves of technological displacement is not well-calibrated for the current wave. The gap is structural and deserves attention.

The honest read

The honest read is that the broader transition the economy is going through will work itself out across years, that the affected individuals are doing more of the adjustment work than the broader public conversation acknowledges, and that the conversation could be more useful if it engaged with the specific operational realities of what displacement looks like.