I've been calling it Deep Blue: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/

Quotes from the article:

'Work as Identity: The Foundation'

Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. A data scientist who has spent a decade building statistical judgment does not experience that judgment as a detachable tool. It is closer to a personality trait. When automation threatens the work, it reaches past the income and touches the identity.'

Excerpt from the article above. It heavily leans on Reddit quotes, articles posted on Reddit and the number of upvotes to backup or sustain certain arguments. But I found the article informative, and publishing a message and a feeling I've been struggling to describe, write or externalise. Hope it's helpful or at least interesting to us here.

Apparently my feelings of disillusionment, confusion, anxiety, failing self esteem and occasionally anger or frustration from AI has a name that's starting to be written and formalised. Though not yet accepted either informally or formally, but it's starting a conversation which I'm thankful for, _Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction_. From the article:

"In September 2025, two psychiatrists at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Stephanie McNamara and Joseph E. Thornton, published a paper in the journal Cureus proposing a new construct they call Artificial Intelligence Replacement Dysfunction, or AIRD."

I'll be sharing this article with my psychologist when we meet in a few weeks.

I am probably different to most people, but I always have trouble understanding why people want to have jobs so much. The obvious and direct answer immediately of course is "to be able to pay the bills".

But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.

But the answer to that in my view is that we should rather do work to be able reach a society where this value will be shared, and not rely on "jobs" being the key thing ultimately.

If I could choose, I would rather not work, and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life. Also what is the point of doing the same jobs generation after generation? Most of the jobs in modern world aren't really what fit our evolutionary primitive desires in the first place, and it's forced stress.

I'm sure people are sad about a changing relationship to their craft, but make no mistake, the biggest sadness people are experiencing in and out of tech is not having a place in society.

Framing the job losses and anxiety as grief is counterproductive. It makes for a longer article because you can shoehorn everything in the infamous and frankly ridiculous "five stages" meme.

The article does push back occasionally, but ends with the students booing Schmidt interpreted as expressing "their grief".

No! That is harmful propaganda. They were expressing their agency and anger at someone who worked 6 years as a programmer, screwed up the Lex rewrite, went straight into management at Sun in 1983 and later moved on to Google.

Now he is rich, can escape to Cyprus any time and lectures the young about where programming is going. How would Schmidt with his buggy Lex know what being a programmer is?

You need more anger, not this grief nonsense that is just designed to weaken you.

How utterly pointless.

AI slop posing as “commentary” on the AI crisis.

Stop trying to demoralize us.