Aren't you tired of reading about how AI will replace you?

Andrew Ng (founder of Coursera and DeepLearning AI) in the latest issue of The Batch took a look at the narrative of an "AI apocalypse" in the labor market.

In short: we are being heavily primed. There will be no mass extinction of programmers.

Someone simply benefits from fueling the hysteria that programmers will soon be begging for alms. Ng highlights two purely business factors:

👉🏻 AI vendors are priming for high price tags.
Typical corporate SaaS costs businesses $100–1000 per user per year. But if you sell the story that a neural network completely "replaces an engineer" with a salary of $100,000, then jacking up the price of an AI tool to $10,000 becomes easy — it looks like a super discount! All this science fiction about "AI will take your job" is just a lever to justify exorbitant prices in the B2B market.

👉🏻 Companies cover up their management screw-ups.
It is incredibly convenient for businesses to mask mass layoffs as "AI adoption and efficiency growth." This sounds smart and innovative to investors. In reality, it's just an attempt to hide the harsh truth: companies bloated their workforce during the pandemic on the back of cheap money, and now they are forced to cut costs because the economy has changed. AI has become the perfect scapegoat.

In reality, hiring of engineers remains strong, and unemployment in the US (as of May 2026) hovers at a healthy 4.3%.

The market is not shrinking; it is mutating. Ng predicts not an apocalypse, but a boom in new jobs.

Breathe out, adapt, and go learn something new.