ninety-two percent

AI-attributed layoffs have pulled back since spring, and it’s tempting to read that as the scare passing. Goldman Sachs reads it the other way: technology takes jobs in recessions, not booms. And right now the AI boom is part of what’s holding a recession off.

On Thursday the Nasdaq fell 2.6%, its worst day since June. Meta dropped nearly 7%, and Intel and AMD about 8% each. The trigger was capital spending, but not in the way anyone expected two years ago. Tesla cut its full-year capex guidance by 20%, and TheStreet’s summary of the mood was that investors had stopped worrying the AI companies were spending too much. They were worried the companies were spending too little, “or more precisely, that future capex could be lower than previously thought.”

Read that again. The market punished restraint. When the biggest buyers in the economy say they’ll buy a little less, everyone downstream gets marked down.

Hold that thought, because the same week Goldman Sachs published something that makes it matter.

the quiet part

Joseph Briggs, a Goldman economist, now estimates AI could displace about 9% of US workers over a decade, roughly one in eleven. That’s up from 6–7% in August 2025. The headline number isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is the timing. Briggs’s argument is that “automation-related labor disruption is limited when the overall economy is healthy but accelerates during cyclical slowdowns.”

He has history behind him. He looked at 25 occupations that technology has hollowed out before: photo processors, movie projectionists, proofreaders, file clerks, bank tellers. Once decline set in, their employment fell an average of 25% within five years. And the routine share of jobs, in Goldman’s data, held steady through expansions and fell sharply in the recessions of the early 1980s, 2001, 2008 and 2020.

Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu found the same thing in 2012, across the whole economy. They studied the routine middle-skill jobs being automated away since the 1980s: clerical work, production, the kind of job that’s a procedure. Ninety-two percent of the job losses in those occupations came within twelve months of a recession. And the jobs didn’t come back afterward. Jaimovich and Siu argue that this is why the last three recoveries were jobless: the jobs that are gone stay gone, while the high-skill and low-skill work around them recovers.

So the quiet in the AI layoff numbers this autumn isn’t a verdict. Goldman says AI-attributed cuts have “pulled back sharply” from their spring peak, and that only 23% of US establishments have put AI into regular workflows. Pantheon Macroeconomics still counts more than 10,000 jobs a month disappearing in AI-exposed sectors like accounting, advertising, office administration and legal work. That’s a slow leak, not a flood. The flood comes later.

the boom is the dam

Here’s why the slowdown is the moment. In good years a company carries roles it no longer strictly needs. Cutting them costs morale, severance and a bad news cycle, and when revenue is growing nobody is asking. A recession changes what’s defensible. Two other Goldman economists, David Mericle and Pierfrancesco Mei, put it plainly last year: companies use recessions to “restructure and streamline their workforce by laying off workers in less productive areas.”

Schumpeter built a theory of the business cycle around this. In his account, innovations come in clusters and drive the boom. The downturn after it is where creative destruction does its clearing, the part historians of his thought describe as its “cleansing effect.” The innovation happens in the boom. The clearing happens in the bust, and the bust is when the costs land on people.

Now apply that to this cycle. Gartner puts global AI investment at $2.7 trillion this year and $3.6 trillion next. That spending is the reason the jobs are redundant, and it’s also a stimulus program in its own right. Pantheon notes that construction employment is rising because of data centers. The boom is hiring electricians while it thins out the accounting floor. It’s propping up the same economy it’s preparing to cut.

Which means the AI boom ending is how AI takes the jobs. Not during the boom. After it. The capex cycle that makes the work automatable is the same cycle that’s postponing the automation, and when the cycle turns, both happen at once. On Thursday the market got its first real look at the turn and flinched. I don’t think it flinched at the right thing.

your quiet year

If you work at a desk and nothing has happened to you yet, that isn’t evidence of anything. In an expansion, a manager’s question is whether you’re performing. In a downturn the question changes, and it isn’t about you. It’s about the role: if this seat were empty tomorrow, would we fill it?

That question doesn’t care about your last review. Jaimovich and Siu’s routine jobs weren’t held by bad workers. They were held by people doing a procedure well, right up until the procedure could be done another way and a recession gave someone a reason to act on it. The decision about which roles fit that description is being made now, in planning spreadsheets, while the money is still flowing. It gets acted on when the money stops.

So the useful thing to do with a quiet year is to read your own job as a list of tasks. Then ask which of them a company would still pay a person for once it has a reason to stop. The work that came back after past recessions was at the ends: the judgment-heavy, the physical, the work tied to a particular place. The middle didn’t.

Booms hire. Recessions decide.

Sources: Stock Market Today, Oct. 23, 2026: Nasdaq falls following tech sell-off, TheStreet via Yahoo Finance ↗ · US tech stocks tumble as investors fret over AI spending, Al Jazeera ↗ · AI could displace one in 11 workers, Goldman says, but the layoffs are likely waiting for a recession, Fortune ↗ · AI is killing 10,000-plus jobs per month and 9% of jobs are at risk, Fortune ↗ · Job Polarization and Jobless Recoveries, NBER Digest ↗ · Jaimovich & Siu, NBER Working Paper 18334 ↗ · Business Cycles, Growth, and Economic Policy: Schumpeter and the Great Depression, Journal of the History of Economic Thought ↗