The tech world continues to hype AI as a world-changing, revolutionary innovation, but so far, it seems to be anything but that for the vast majority of regular people. Every day, there’s another discomfiting story of how AI is upending people’s lives, often in chillingly inhuman ways.

A woman who says her husband was a victim of Microsoft’s recent round of 6,000 layoffs is a perfect example, and it suggests an unfathomably dark future.

The woman says her husband was laid off from Microsoft after being randomly selected by an algorithm.

It’s important to note that the woman’s story could not be verified, but there’s nothing in it that is remotely implausible given recent trends in the tech industry. This includes at Microsoft, which announced 6,000 layoffs (or about 3% of its workforce) earlier this month. As you might guess, in this day and age, AI is likely the main reason why.

According to Microsoft’s CEOArtificial Intelligence now writes some 30% of Microsoft’s code. Accordingly, programmers were the hardest hit among its layoffs, and in a twist that seems almost laughably on-the-nose, those layoffs included Gabriela de Queiroz, Microsoft’s own Director of Artificial Intelligence for its startup products.

If de Queiroz isn’t even safe, it makes you wonder about everyone else. And this Reddit story does little to provide a rosier glimpse into the future.

“My husband was laid off from Microsoft by an algorithm,” she wrote, chosen at random by a line of code, likely written by someone replaced by AI, if not written by AI itself.

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Her husband was laid off after 25 years of dedicated service. His last day is his 48th birthday.

To hear her tell it, her husband should have been dead last on the list of layoff priorities. “He’s the most quietly loyal, brilliant person I’ve ever met,” she wrote. “Never missed a day of work. Rarely called in sick (and would then work from home). Worked 60+ hours a week.”

He even picked up shifts on holidays to make sure colleagues with kids could stay home and never asked for raises or to be promoted, she wrote.

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“He just kept showing up and solving impossible problems” — and won multiple awards for doing so. “Even the CEOs knew his name,” she added. “Now he’s being walked out,” just months after his 25th anniversary at Microsoft. And to twist the knife, his last day will be his 48th birthday.

“I don’t need pity,” she went on to say. “I just need someone to know what this world does to the people who give it everything — quietly, consistently, and without ever asking for more.”

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AI-generated layoffs are nothing new, but they point to a deeply dystopian approach.

The tech overlords can spin this as innovative and future-focused all they want — and the leaders of Microsoft, along with Amazon, Google, Meta, and many others who have done similarly sweeping AI-fueled layoffs in recent months, have all done that same tap dance.

But both this situation and this approach are downright disturbing in their lack of humanity. It speaks to an eerie lack of basic human decency on the part of the leadership of these companies and the tech industry in general. It is weird and creepy, and it is deeply, disquietingly abnormal that these leaders don’t think so.

Calling this out won’t change anything — their brains are so pickled by power that they are likely unable to care about anything but more power. Well, that and money, of course, which is what Microsoft execs chalked these layoffs up to, in the most robotically corporate verbiage possiblecalling them “organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.”

But as Genevieve Harrison, a former Microsoft executive herself, pointed out in a LinkedIn post on the subject, that explanation doesn’t really hold water. The cost of the 6,000 employees laid off amounts to approximately 4.6% of a single quarter of Microsoft’s profits.

As Harrison astutely puts it, “In what universe does a company eliminate thousands of lives and livelihoods to save what amounts to a rounding error in its quarterly earnings?” When those “lives and livelihoods” include even one of its own Directors of AI, the fibbing becomes impossible to ignore.

And it’s as deeply disquieting as the real kick in the head of this entire situation: Many of these 6,000 employees, including this Redditor’s husband, devoted their lives to creating the kind of magic the tech industry was once known for. Creating, developing, and molding innovations that were supposed to change our lives and usher in an unstoppably optimistic new world.

Instead, those innovations are not only being used to erase them and their accomplishments, but to decide who exactly gets the axe and when. In the end, these people have nothing to show for their years of diligent service but betrayal, and one delivered with sociopathic indifference. But yes, please tell us again how “nobody wants to work anymore.”

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.