Agentic AI
Software that doesn’t just answer, it acts. Books the meeting, writes the code, files the ticket. It replaces the workflow, not the search bar.
← JobocalypseA field dictionary
The lexicon
A field dictionary
for the new economy.
The words for what’s happening to work. The language of AI, layoffs, and figuring out who you are after the job. Search it, filter it, learn it.
100 terms
Quiet Cutting
Reassigning someone to a worse role until they quit on their own. A layoff with the paperwork outsourced to despair.
Ghost Work
The invisible human labor propping up “automated” systems. Someone’s still back there. They’re just not in the brochure.
Severance-core
The strange new genre of people filming their own layoffs. Grief, monetized, and weirdly comforting to watch.
The Last Rung
The entry-level job AI ate first, so the ladder now starts on the second floor and nobody can reach it.
Post-Economic Identity
Who you are when the job title is gone. The question this whole thing is really about.
Skill Collapse
When a skill that took years to build becomes a button someone else pushes.
Job Displacement Crisis
The polite economist phrase for “the jobs are not coming back.”
The 100-Year Job Crisis
The theory that this isn’t a recession you wait out. It’s a century-long rearrangement of what work even is.
Synthetic Labor
Work done by software instead of people. Cheaper, faster, never asks for a raise or a Friday off.
Synthetic Creativity
Machines making the art, the copy, the music. The last thing we swore they couldn’t take.
AI-Powered HR
The system that screens you, ranks you, and sometimes fires you, before a person ever reads your name.
Gig Economy 2.0
When even the side hustle gets automated. The safety net was a trampoline. Now it’s the floor.
Universal Basic Income (UBI)
A monthly check for existing. If the machines do the work, the idea goes, people should still get to eat. Lifeline to some, surrender to others.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
The optimistic ending: robots do everything and the abundance gets shared. File under “nice if we get there.”
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
AI that can do anything a person can, and then some. The finish line nobody agrees is close and nobody wants to be wrong about.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
The text engines that went from autocomplete to coworker in about eighteen months.
Cognitive Automation
Automating thinking, not lifting. The reason “knowledge work” stopped being a safe word.
Cobots (Collaborative Robots)
The robot that works right next to you. Friendly, until it’s learned enough to work instead of you.
Humanoid Robots
Robots built in our shape, so they can use the tools and spaces made for us. Including the ones at your job.
AI Singularity
The hypothetical moment machine intelligence outruns ours and stops waiting for permission.
Superintelligence
Smarter than all of us combined. Thrilling or terrifying depending on who’s holding the leash.
The Great AI Replacement
The quiet swap of people for programs, one role at a time, until the org chart is mostly footnotes.
The Black Box Problem
The machine made a decision about your loan, your job, your future. Nobody, including its makers, can fully say why.
AI Hallucinations
When the machine states a confident, fluent, completely made-up fact. Now picture it running payroll.
Algorithmic Oppression
When the bias isn’t a person’s anymore. It’s baked into the model, and the model doesn’t take calls.
AI-Powered Social Credit
Scoring humans like restaurants. Behave and the doors open. Don’t, and they quietly don’t.
The End of Human Agency
The creeping sense that the choices are being made upstream, and you’re just clicking accept.
Surveillance Capitalism
The business model where you’re not the customer. You’re the inventory.
Predictive Analytics
Software that guesses what you’ll do next, often before you do. Sold to whoever’s buying.
Deepfake Technology
Video and audio of things that never happened, good enough that “seeing is believing” just retired.
AI-Generated Misinformation
Lies at industrial scale, personalized and tireless. The firehose that never needs a break.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)
Government money, programmable. Spend it how they say, when they say, or watch it expire.
Automated Wealth Management
The robo-advisor running your retirement. It doesn’t panic. That’s both the pitch and the risk.
Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)
Wiring the mind straight to the machine. The last interface, for better or much worse.
The Metaverse
The pitch to move your life indoors, into a world someone else owns and rents back to you.
Spatial Computing
Computers that live in the room with you instead of on a screen. The office, everywhere, always.
Transhumanism
The belief we should upgrade ourselves like hardware. Utopia or vanity, pick your century.
Machine Learning (ML)
Software that improves by example instead of instruction. Show it enough of your job and it learns to do your job.
Deep Learning
Machine learning stacked many layers deep, loosely modeled on the brain. The engine behind most of what suddenly works.
Neural Networks
The math that lets machines find patterns nobody programmed. Including the pattern that is your workflow.
Reinforcement Learning
Teaching a machine by reward and penalty until it beats the person who trained it.
Autonomous Systems
Machines that decide and act with no human in the loop. Efficient, right up until you wanted a human in the loop.
AI Ethics
The field asking whether we should. Usually convened right after we already did.
Sentient Machines
The sci-fi fear. Less urgent than the boring machines quietly taking the paychecks.
Federated Learning
Training AI on everyone’s data without moving it. Privacy-friendly on paper, still learning from you.
Exoskeletons
Wearable machines that let one worker lift like three. Great, until the math notices the other two.
Autonomous Drones
Flying machines that deliver, surveil, or strike, no pilot required. Pick your use case.
Robot Swarms
Many cheap robots acting as one. Cheaper than one expensive human, by design.
Soft Robotics
Robots with a gentle grip, built for the delicate jobs machines used to fumble. Now they don’t.
AI-Powered Surveillance
Cameras that don’t just record. They recognize, score, and remember.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Everyday objects online and talking. Your fridge has opinions now, and an audience.
Internet of Bodies (IoB)
When the sensors move from your devices onto you. The body as a data feed.
Digital Twins
A living software copy of a person, machine, or city. Useful for planning. Unsettling when the copy is you and never calls in sick.
Digital Identity
The version of you that lives in databases. Increasingly the only one that counts.
Digital Panopticon
A world built so you never know when you’re being watched, so you behave as if you always are.
Algorithmic Bias
When the model inherits our worst habits and applies them at scale, politely.
Data Monetization
Turning your behavior into someone else’s revenue. You made the product. You are the product.
Smart Cities
Cities wired to optimize everything, including you. Efficient, watchful, hard to opt out of.
Data Sovereignty
The fight over who owns and governs your data. Spoiler: usually not you.
AI-Powered Propaganda
Persuasion at industrial scale, personalized to each mind it’s bending.
Digital Censorship
When the off switch for speech is code, and the code doesn’t explain itself.
AI Weaponization
Pointing the same tools that write your emails at targets. Dual-use, all the way down.
Cybernetic Warfare
Conflict fought in networks and code, where the front line is everywhere and nowhere.
AI-Powered Productivity
Do more with fewer people. The polite framing for the layoff you haven’t announced yet.
AI Freelancing
Hiring a model instead of a human for the one-off job. The freelancer’s freelancer, and it works for pennies.
Remote Work Automation
First they let you work from home. Then they noticed the home didn’t need you either.
Digital Nomadism 3.0
Untethered work as freedom, or as the last move before the work untethers from you.
Global Labor Shift
The great reshuffling of who does what, and whether “who” is still a person.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
Banking without banks, run by code. Liberating and unforgiving in equal measure.
Smart Contracts
Agreements that enforce themselves. No lawyer, no mercy, no undo.
The Death of Cash
A world where every payment is seen. Convenient, traceable, permanent.
Digital Fiat Takeover
When national money goes fully digital, and “your” money comes with settings.
AI-Powered Fraud Detection
The system that flags you as suspicious and can’t tell you why.
Tokenized Economies
Turning everything, art, homes, hours, into tradable tokens. Ownership, financialized to the atom.
AI-Driven Trading
Markets moving at machine speed, where your reflexes were never the point.
Neural Implants
Hardware in the head. The upgrade path for people who’d rather not be left behind by the machines.
Cognitive Enhancement
Boosting your brain, chemically or digitally, to keep pace. The new arms race is between your ears.
Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI)
The seam where person meets system. It keeps moving closer to the skin.
Digital Immortality
Uploading a copy of you that outlives you. Comforting or horrifying, no refunds.
Biohacking
DIY upgrades to your own biology. Taking the future into your own hands, literally.
Web3
The pitch for an internet you own instead of rent. Still mostly a pitch.
Augmented Reality (AR)
Digital layers pasted over the real world. The ads are coming for the sky.
Virtual Reality (VR)
A world you can step into. Handy when the real economy has no room for you.
AI Virtual Assistants
The helpful voice that runs your calendar, and quietly learns to run your job.
Fully Automated Supply Chains
Goods from factory to doorstep with no human hands. Efficient, until you were one of the hands.
Drone Deliveries
The last mile, minus the driver. Another route that used to be a paycheck.
3D-Printed Manufacturing
Making things on demand, anywhere. The factory shrinks to a desktop, and so does the payroll.
Autonomous Freight Systems
Trucks, ships, and warehouses that run themselves. Millions of jobs on that road.
The End of Privacy
The slow trade of everything about you for a convenience you stopped noticing you agreed to.
AI-Controlled Governance
When the state runs on algorithms and “computer says no” becomes the law.
Automated Warfare Dystopia
War with the humans taken out of the killing. The ultimate labor-saving device.
Neural Indoctrination
Shaping what people believe by shaping what they see, at the speed of a feed.
AI-Driven Surveillance State
When watching everyone got cheap enough to do all the time.
Climate Surveillance
Watching the earth in real time. The same lens, pointed down, watches you too.
AI Alignment Problem
Making sure a mind smarter than us wants what we want. Unsolved, and load-bearing.
The Singularity Debate
The argument over whether the machines pass us next year, next decade, or never. Everyone’s confident.
The Machine God Hypothesis
The idea we’re building something we’ll end up worshipping. Or answering to.
AI-Driven Erosion of Free Will
When enough of your choices are nudged, predicted, and pre-made, what’s left to call yours?
AI Consciousness Paradox
We can’t define our own awareness, yet we’ll have to decide whether the machine has it.