His boss asked if AI could replace human coders. Two weeks later, he and 160 ... - Fortune

TEXT START: Computer programmer Fei Zhaojun’s boss asked him if artificial intelligence could soon replace humans in coding jobs.

1. The Dissection

This is an early autopsy of the wage-labor circuit disguised as a report on adaptation. The article documents the mechanism plainly: 160 coders dismissed, scriptwriting teams halved, translation pay cut by more than half, foreign-language programs losing status, creative output collapsing, and robots entering delivery and logistics.

Then it cushions the evidence with stories of vlogging, independent publishing, AI training, and teacher optimism. The reader is redirected from the structural question—where does mass purchasing power come from when labor is no longer needed?—to the individual question of how displaced workers can improvise.

China’s aggressive AI diffusion makes it a useful stress test. The article shows P1 already operating: AI performs cognitive tasks cheaply enough to eliminate labor. It also shows P2 approaching: policy and competitive pressure make preservation of human-only economic domains unstable. The layoffs and wage compression are early P3: productive participation is being withdrawn.

2. The Core Fallacy

The central error is treating displacement as a temporary skills mismatch that can be solved through retraining, entrepreneurship, or demographic decline.

A shrinking workforce may reduce the number of workers required. It does not restore the wages, ownership, or bargaining power of those made unnecessary. Productivity can rise while mass income and consumption weaken. Aging is therefore not a cure; it is a demographic delay mechanism that may allow automation to replace workers faster without immediately producing headline unemployment.

The claim that humans remain decision makers is equally weak. AI-assisted judgment increases the output of each remaining worker, which makes fewer workers necessary. Human oversight can survive as a narrow supervisory layer without preserving mass employment.

3. Hidden Assumptions

• AI errors will remain severe enough to preserve broad human roles.
• Human selection and supervision will remain valuable rather than being automated or compressed.
• Independent ventures can absorb workers displaced by firms with vastly greater capital and distribution.
• Demographic decline will absorb displaced labor instead of merely reducing the number of wage earners.
• Official unemployment figures capture underemployment, falling pay, and labor-force withdrawal.
• Workers can individually adapt at the speed of firms deploying capital-intensive systems.
• Government-led AI adoption will distribute gains broadly rather than accelerating concentration of ownership.

These assumptions convert a system transition into a personal responsibility story.

4. Social Function

Primary classification: partial truth serving as transition management and ideological anesthetic.

The article is not pure propaganda because it openly reports layoffs, wage destruction, and fear. Its anesthetic function lies in presenting these events as isolated career adjustments rather than evidence that the wage-to-consumption circuit is being severed.

It also performs elite self-exoneration. Firms are portrayed as responding rationally to technology, governments as pursuing modernization, and workers as responsible for reinventing themselves. The ownership question—who controls the AI systems and captures the productivity surplus—is largely absent.

5. The Verdict

China is not demonstrating that AI can be absorbed harmlessly by an aging society. It is demonstrating how quickly a state can accelerate P1, make P2 harder to resist, and expose P3 through layoffs and wage collapse.

The adaptation stories are not proof of restored economic participation. They are small Servitor, Hyena, and Option 4 experiments conducted around a shrinking core of machine-owned production. The mechanical death of the old order is already visible; its social death is lagging behind because institutions, demographics, and optimism still provide cover.

AI Plus will likely make China more productive while making more of its population economically unnecessary. Without a new ownership and distribution regime, the article’s cheerful adaptation narrative is merely the obituary being read before the body is cold.