Under AI FOMO, why have both companies and employees become "actors"?

[[**Driven by AI FOMO, companies and employees are being forced to become "actors": in 2026, 33% of tech layoffs are AI-related, 16% of U.S. employees pretend to use AI at work to please their bosses, and efficiency anxiety is turning into a widespread existential crisis.**

**Key points**

**1. Layoffs accelerate, with AI as the main cause**

33% of tech industry layoffs in 2026 are AI-related, compared with only 1% in 2024; as of press time, of the more than 130,000 layoffs this year, 92,913 can be attributed to AI, a share as high as 72%.

**2. Companies are incorporating AI usage into performance reviews**

Some teams have begun including token usage (Tokenmaxxing) in KPIs, making it a new symbol of the working class; apps across industries are also racing to add AI features to raise valuation expectations.

**3. A large number of employees pretend to use AI**

Surveys show that 51% of American workers worry about losing their jobs because of AI, 72% of professionals lack confidence in their own ability to adapt, 16% of employees pretend to use AI to please their bosses, and 60%-70% of technology leaders invest in AI out of FOMO.

**4. The anxiety is essentially fear of death and self-instrumentalization**

**5. Philosophical reflection: humans actively "mechanize" themselves**

Some scholars believe that AI appears more human by hiding human labor, while humans are actively outsourcing their thinking to AI to evade the responsibility of being human; what is truly attractive is the fantasy of a "benevolent agent" that AI evokes, not its reality. 2026-10-12 07:36 AI FOMO is turning both companies and employees into "actors" Cixiang Gongshe Quick Read

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Cixiang Gongshe, author: Cixiang Gongshe Editorial Department

Under AI FOMO, the survival and performance of workers worldwide.

AI FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is no longer a new term; in fact, few people even mention FOMO anymore. When the tide of AI has risen to the necks of human workers, surviving the battle royale matters more than anxiety and shouting.

At least at the macro level, that is how things are, as can be seen from the layoff data.

Layoffs.fyi, a website dedicated to tracking layoff data at global tech companies, shows that in 2026, 33% of layoff events were AI-related, while in 2024 that figure was 1%. Amazon, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, PayPal... those big companies that were once the ultimate destination for tech workhorses have all appeared on the layoff rankings, baring their excusable fangs. And in terms of the total number of laid-off employees, 92,913 tech company layoffs worldwide this year can be attributed to AI, accounting for 72% of the total number of layoffs. (Data source: crunchbase.com)

As of press time, Layoffs.fyi has tracked more than 130,000 layoffs this year

Within companies, the mood of AI FOMO is gradually taking concrete form: raising lobsters and using tokens have begun to enter the KPI assessment mechanisms of some teams, and Tokenmaxxing (maximizing token usage) has become a symbol of a work class. Whether doing content, social networking, or e-commerce, you must add some AI features to your app to raise future expectations and valuations. Wudaokou and Zhongguancun, once in decline, are once again gathering many AI startups, providing jobs while also bringing opportunities for leaps forward.

Creating jobs on one side and destroying them on the other, on recruitment apps, countless traditional positions have AI added to their titles, forcing job seekers to revise and polish their resumes again and again as models and agents iterate. In a gold rush, very few get to eat meat, some get to drink the soup, and more smell the tempting scent of blood, only to discover when they reach the iron pot that what is stewing inside is themselves—not everyone is qualified to sell shovels, but you still need to have a set of tools for digging your own grave; before the tombstone is built, you might just dig up a gold mine.

The true nature of my work. Image source: Boss Zhipin

A survey summary on Howworks.ai shows that in 2026, 51% of American workers worry about losing their jobs because of AI; 72% of professionals lack confidence in their ability to adapt to AI; and 16% of American employees pretend to use AI at work to please their bosses. It does not matter if you cannot use AI; what matters is not letting your boss think you cannot. Before mastering AI capabilities, it is best to first put on a posture of enthusiasm for AI—60%-70% of technology leaders say that FOMO is an important reason they get their departments or organizations to invest in AI. And the secret to the long-term survival of the contemporary workhorse is to address the needs and anxieties of leaders.

Fear comes from the unknown. Fabre would not suffer from insect phobia, and materialists think Cthulhu is nothing but ghosts and monsters. The more you know about AI, the lighter the sense of FOMO becomes, which sounds fine. But most of the information flooding toward us in the current content landscape is probably not meant to lead people closer to the truth and dispel the unknown, but rather to further play up the irreplaceability of the AI industry. Ask yourself honestly: have we really become more relaxed amid the massive amount of AI news and paid subscriptions? Probably not; we can only breathe a sigh of relief during statutory holidays away from the city and the office, yet still have to be shocked again and again by the performance of opus5.5 while scrolling short videos before bed.

The romantic philosophy section is now also handled by Claude. Image source: Bilibili

Sheep flocks have a natural tendency to gather toward the center. The shepherd dog's first principle is to run, bark, and stare at the periphery of the flock, driving stragglers back to the middle of the group. The sense of security that comes from being surrounded by companions is written into our genes; people whose body clocks are reversed wake before dark, and in their hearts there is always emptiness and loneliness—that is the feeling of a monkey abandoned by its troop, and it is also the psychological prototype of FOMO.

The last large-scale collective FOMO humanity experienced was probably the social media FOMO of Gen Z. In many films and television works depicting the lives of young people in Europe and America, training the camera on the Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok content on their phones is an indispensable shot. Teenagers who fail to promptly participate in and pay attention to messages on their smartphones are very likely to suffer collective exclusion and even bullying. The FOMO over the Xiaotiancai phone watches of Chinese primary school students belongs to the same category.

In the era of social media FOMO, what is closer to the lives of Chinese adults is WeChat Moments FOMO. When you have nothing to do, scroll through WeChat more, and don't miss friends' weddings, advisors' academic conferences, leaders' trips to Europe, and old classmates' newborn babies at home—all are worth liking to express salute, and incidentally become icebreaker topics the next time you meet. Even when there is nothing going on, you can still stalk, confirming that you are still doing the right things at just the right age, properly continuing the five-thousand-year East Asian ethnography—in order to escape this FOMO state, more and more people today choose to disable or stop posting on Moments, to extricate themselves from illusory anxiety.

Social FOMO brings a sense of being abandoned by the group, but when it comes to AI FOMO, humans feel a tangible existential crisis—in 2026, a meta-analysis paper understanding AI anxiety (AIAX) based on terror management theory showed that AI anxiety reflects a deep-seated fear of non-existence (that is, death) and is closely related to death anxiety. It is not merely a kind of technological anxiety caused by lack of skills and insufficient confidence; it also involves individuals' fear of technological domination and symbolic worries about humanity being eliminated.

In June this year, a survey published by Nature covering 1,907 researchers in 75 countries worldwide showed that 48% of respondents held negative views of AI, 30% held positive views, and 22% were neutral; 63% of respondents believed that when using AI tools such as LLMs for data or literature analysis, the risks outweigh the benefits, and nearly 60% of respondents said they would fall behind if they did not use AI tools. In September, a joint statement by 26 Fields Medal winners including Terence Tao also expressed the academic community's concern and caution about AI, though this letter was popularly interpreted from another angle as—the vested interests in academia are somewhat unable to afford losing in the face of AI.

(Before this article was published, OpenAI released 722 mathematical results all at once, drawing another public boycott from the Association for Human Mathematics (AHM). AI's forceful encroachment forces human workers to clearly draw boundaries in their own fields for self-preservation.)

Image source: internet

Japanese scholar Kazunori Ohumi believes that the reason we fear AI will eliminate humans and make life lose its value is not that AI is too powerful, but that human society long ago equated the ontological existence of life with efficiency. Being eliminated, useful or useless, are concepts originally applicable only to tools. Only when humans are accustomed to seeing themselves as tools for production, calculation, and profit does the question of humans being replaced by AI become valid.

From the perspective of historical evolution, people have long been accustomed to understanding desire as lack, always feeling that their present selves are incomplete and need to make up for deficiencies or gain improvement. In modern society, this obsession has been further secularized; human value has been simplified into educational credentials, performance, productivity, and skills, and AI happens to demonstrate advantages surpassing humans in these highly quantified functions.

Because humans have already downgraded their own value to functions in advance, when AI does better in this dimension, people naturally fall into anxiety about losing value and losing the meaning of existence. An "artificial" intelligent agent that perfectly conforms to human preferences will only further amplify this cold efficiency-ism.

In a philosophy paper published in AI and Ethics in May 2026 by Siri Beerends and others, an even bolder view was put forward: today's AI has not truly become an agent, but hides human labor through various means to make AI sound or look more human. And this is merely to echo a hidden need of humans: humans are actively "mechanizing" themselves to escape the responsibilities of being human.

AI is the new Big Other of this era. Rather than asking yourself "What do I want to do?", the simpler question is to ask AI "What should I do?" AI time and again provides us with convenient solutions and continuously gains trust, until after we outsource the vast majority of labor and thinking to it, we no longer need to face those questions of meaning that we will eventually encounter in a life of lag and frustration. In the paper's conclusion, the authors wrote: "Like religion, what truly attracts people is not the reality of artificial intelligence, but the fantasy it evokes—a benevolent, human-like intelligence that can fully embrace us and improve our lives. People do not need this fantasy to come true; the fantasy itself, and the longing it nourishes, are already enough."

Even without discussing it from a philosophical perspective, the unemployment problems, distribution problems, and the resulting disappearance of entry-level positions, collapse of workers' bargaining power, and narrowing of mobility brought by AI have already made a considerable number of people tangibly perceive the threat of "being slain." This is an involuntary sacrifice. It is packaged as efficiency, innovation, and inevitable progress, as if whoever opposes it is obstructing the times. But the gains of efficiency have not flowed to those replaced by efficiency. The costs behind rising valuations, shareholder returns, and the computing power explosion are being borne by freshly graduated students, laid-off middle-aged people, and gig workers. A generation's career starting point is disappearing, and everyone wants to be a boarder on Noah's Ark.

At this juncture of humanity's fate, we should all stand in our own positions and piously cast a vote that matters only in participation, even if this vote is lighter than a feather and perhaps already insignificant in the flood of AI information. If pessimists are always right and optimists always move forward, may it be that after the AI wave passes through human history, there will still be a group of people alive in the world speaking correct nonsense.

References:

1. Tech Layoffs Outpace 2025 As Big Companies Shift Spending To AI, Crunchbase.com

2. What Is AI FOMO?(And How to Actually Overcome It)howworks.ai

3. Chunxiao Li etc.Understanding AI anxiety based on terror management theory:A meta analytical construction.2026

4. "The Genealogy and Reversal of Existential Negation:From Desire-as-Lack and the Absolutization of the Self to Human Redundancy and Generative-Resonant Ontology."Zenodo,2026

5. "AI and the machinization of humans:an escape from the burdens of existence."AI&Society,2025AI Venture Capital Daily Channel: Frontier Technology This content comes from the internet, original link; the views represent only the author and do not represent Huxiu's position. For copyright issues, please contact hezuo@huxiu.com, and we will verify and handle it promptly. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is on the Huxiu APP[ ]