Will the Last Person Leaving- Turn Out the Lights? AI, the Future of Work, and What We Do Now

In1971, someone rented a billboard near Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle for $160. It read: "Will the last person leaving Seattle - turn out the lights." Boeing had just shed more than 60,000 jobs. My father was one of them. I was two years old.

I don't remember the sentiment of that era. I only know it through the stories,the fear, the uncertainty, the quiet dinners, the hushed conversations about what comes next. My father navigated it. Seattle navigated it. And Boeing, eventually, came back.

But here's what keeps me up at night: I'm living through my own version of that billboard moment. Right now. And I suspect a lot of you reading this are too.

This week, Block, the financial technology company, eliminated roughly 50% of its workforce. The stated reasons: AI capabilities and cost efficiencies. They are far from alone. Across industries, from tech to finance to logistics to media, the equation is shifting in real time. Companies are discovering that AI doesn't just automate tasks, it restructures the very architecture of how work gets done, how many people are needed, and which skills still matter tomorrow.

This is not a doom piece. I refuse to write one of those. But I also won't insult your intelligence by pretending we aren't standing at a genuine inflection point, one that demands honest conversation from workers, from leaders, and from society at large.

So let's have it.

The Billboard Moment We're In

The 1971 Boeing crisis was local, industry-specific, and in hindsight recoverable. What we're facing today is something with far wider reach. AI-driven displacement doesn't care what city you live in. It doesn't care what industry you're in. It's showing up in law firms, hospitals, marketing agencies, financial services, customer support centers, and yes, tech companies themselves.

According to Goldman Sachs, AI could automate tasks currently performed by the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally. That number deserves a moment of silence. Not panic.but genuine, clear-eyed pause.

"The question is not whether disruption is coming. It already arrived. The question is whether we will be intentional about what we build in its wake."

The Boeing bust hit Seattle and left a billboard. This current moment is hitting everywhere, simultaneously, with a speed that even its architects didn't fully anticipate. The workers being displaced aren't just line workers or entry-level staff they're mid-career professionals, experienced managers, skilled specialists who did everything right and still found themselves on the wrong side of an algorithm-driven efficiency model.

I know because I'm one of them. And in my network, I see dozens more.

What Workers Must Do Now- Without Waiting for Permission

I want to speak directly to anyone currently in job search mode, or who feels the ground shifting beneath their feet at their current company. I'm not going to give you a list of tips. I'm going to tell you what I believe is true.

Your identity cannot live in your job title.

One of the cruelest tricks of modern professional culture is how thoroughly it has fused our sense of self-worth with our employment status. When that title disappears through no fault of your own,it feels like erasure. It isn't. The skills you built, the judgment you developed, the relationships you cultivated: those are yours. A layoff notice cannot revoke them.

But it does force the necessary question: What do I actually know how to do, independent of the org chart I was embedded in?

AI is not just your competition - it's your new toolbox.

The workers who will thrive in this next chapter are not those who resist AI, nor those who are naively replaced by it. They are the ones who learn to deploy it fluently, critically, creatively. You don't need to become an engineer. But you do need to develop what I'd call AI fluency: the ability to understand what these tools can and cannot do, to prompt them well, to layer your own judgment on top of their outputs, and to bring the distinctly human capabilities they lack context, ethics, relationship, intuition to the surface.

That's not optional anymore. It's the new baseline.

Build a portfolio of value, not just a resume of roles.

The traditional resume is a historical document. It tells employers where you've been. What forward-looking companies want to understand is what you can make happen what problems you can solve, supported by what you've created and what you've changed. Start building that now: write, publish, collaborate, create, volunteer in ways that generate visible evidence of your capability.

Invest in your network like its infrastructure.

Jobs increasingly go to people, not postings. In a market flooded with candidates and screened by AI applicant systems, the human connection remains the most reliable path. Not transactional networking, genuine relationship. Reach out. Share what you're learning. Be generous with what you know. The people in your orbit are navigating this too, and mutual investment in each other is not just good strategy; it's good humanity.

What Leaders and Companies Must Reckon With

Now I want to address the executives, the board members, the HR leaders, and the managers reading this  because you bear a particular kind of responsibility at this moment.

I understand the economic logic of AI adoption and workforce reduction. I have sat in those rooms. The spreadsheet math is compelling. Margins improve. Output scale. Investors cheer. But the full accounting hasn't been done because the full costs don't appear on your P&L.

The social contract of employment is fraying - and companies helped fray it.

For decades, the implicit deal was this: give us your best years, your loyalty, your expertise, and we will give you stability, growth, and a reasonable degree of security. That deal has been gradually unwound through gig-ification, through perpetual restructuring, through the elevation of shareholder return above all other stakeholders.

AI-driven mass layoffs are the latest  and perhaps most acute chapter of that unwinding. When a company eliminates 50% of its workforce in a single announcement, it doesn't just affect those employees. It sends a signal to every remaining employee, every prospective hire, every community that company touches: you are a cost center, not a community.

Leaders should ask themselves honestly: Is that the signal we want to send? And is it actually true?

Efficiency without humanity is a strategy with hidden costs.

The companies that will win over the next decade are not those that cut deepest. They are those that reorganize most thoughtfully  that figure out how to use AI to elevate human contribution rather than simply replace it. That distinction requires intentional leadership, not just financial engineering.

It means asking: What can humans do in our organization that AI genuinely cannot? Where does judgment, relationship, creativity, and ethical discernment matter most? And how do we redesign work around those anchors, rather than simply automating everything touchable and laying off the remainder?

Transition support is not charity - it's organizational integrity.

When displacement is unavoidable and sometimes it genuinely is how a company handles it defines its character for a generation. Meaningful severance, retraining investment, extended benefits, honest communication, and genuine placement support are not soft extras. They are the measure of whether a company sees its people as partners or inputs.

The talent markets have long memories. So do communities.

Think beyond the quarterly cycle.

Corporate leaders are structurally incentivized toward short-term thinking. But the AI transition is a long-arc story. Companies that only optimize for the next two quarters will find themselves with hollowed-out institutional knowledge, cultural wreckage, and reputational debt that takes years to repay. The ones that play the longer game — investing in their people's evolution even as the work evolves will build the adaptive capacity that becomes their actual competitive advantage.

What Society Must Figure Out -The Open Questions

I want to be honest about what I don't know. What none of us know. Because intellectual humility is called for here alongside conviction.

"Every previous technological revolution created more jobs than it destroyed but not always for the same people, in the same places, on the same timeline. That 'not always' is where real people live."

The questions that remain genuinely unresolved are significant. They deserve our sustained attention as a society, not platitudes.

What happens to the middle? Previous automation waves hit repetitive, physical, lower-wage work hardest. AI is different: it's hitting cognitive, knowledge-based, mid-to-upper wage work with surprising force. The economic disruption to the professional middle class is not something our social safety nets were designed to absorb. What do we build in their place?

What is the role of education? If the shelf life of specific skills is now measured in years rather than careers, what is the purpose and design of a four-year degree? How do we build continuous, accessible, affordable learning pathways that can keep pace with AI's evolution? And who pays for it?

What about ownership of the productivity gains? When AI generates enormous efficiency gains for companies, where do those gains flow? Historically in this era, they have flowed overwhelmingly to capital to shareholders while workers bear the transition costs. Is that sustainable? Is it just? These are not rhetorical questions. They are policy questions, and they will be answered one way or another either proactively through good leadership, or reactively through social friction we'd all prefer to avoid.

What does "meaningful work" become? For most of human history, work was primarily an economic necessity. For a subset of modern knowledge workers, it became also a source of identity, purpose, and community. As AI absorbs more of the cognitive task load, what fills that space? This is not just an economic question, it's a philosophical and psychological one that we are utterly unprepared for as a culture.

What are the second-order effects we're not seeing yet? Every major technology transition has produced surprising  effects that were invisible from the vantage point of the transition itself. We don't know what we don't know. That uncertainty is uncomfortable. It should also be energizing because it means the future is genuinely open, and the choices we make now matter.

The Lights Are Still On

Here's what I believe: the lights are not going out.

Not because this isn't hard, it is. Not because the disruption isn't real it's very real. But because human beings have an extraordinary capacity to adapt, to innovate, and to find meaning in new configurations of contribution. Every previous inflection point in the history of work looked, from inside it, like it might be the end. It never was.

My father lost his Boeing job in 1971 and built another career. Seattle lost 60,000 aerospace jobs and became a tech capital. The billboard was dark humor born of real fear but the lights stayed on.

I believe they will again. But not automatically. Not without choices.

Workers will need to choose continuous growth over comfortable stagnation. Leaders will need to choose long-term stewardship over short-term extraction. Policy makers will need to choose proactive design over reactive damage control. And all of us will need to choose to see the people being displaced not as unfortunate statistics — but as our neighbors, our colleagues, our family members, ourselves.

"The future of work will be shaped not by what AI can do, but by what we decide it should be for."

I'm living this transition. I'm in the middle of it right now; job searching, recalibrating, investing in what's next. And I'm writing this not because I have all the answers, but because I think we need more voices in the conversation who are experiencing it from the inside, not just analyzing it from the outside.

If you're in this with me navigating a displacement, leading a team through uncertainty, designing policies for a workforce in flux I'd love to hear from you. Because the only way through a moment like this is together.

The billboard was meant as a joke. Let's make sure it stays that way.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone navigating the same moment. And if you're a leader thinking about these questions, let's talk.

About the Author

Tabetha Taylor, CPC has spent her career sitting across the table from leaders making hard calls and helping them get it right. She's a Talent and HR executive who believes HR's job isn't just to support the business, it's to move it forward through the power of people.

Tabetha can be reached at tabetha@tabethataylor.com.