Silicon Valley’s success story – built by Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft – has reshaped the popular imagination with promises of economic dynamism, innovation and thousands of high-skilled jobs.
Yet behind the celebration, data reveals a stark reality: these companies have ultimately destroyed more jobs than they have created, hollowing out traditional sectors, deepening inequality, and slowing wage growth across the US and UK. A careful examination of labour market evidence exposes how big tech’s relentless push for efficiency through automation and market disruption is a net negative for employment.
History suggests technological progress can lift people into new economic opportunities, but a massive MIT study (‘The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018’, published in 2022) tracking 35,000 US occupations from 1940 to 2018 reveals a dramatic shift in recent decades. While technology once spawned whole new fields of work, the era from 1980 onward saw automation far surpass job creation, especially wiping out middle-skill professions like machinists and clerical workers.
The effect: more jobs replaced than generated, with a widening gulf between highly paid tech professionals and those stuck in low-wage service roles. In the UK, pre-tech boom data (1997–2005) showed jobs created just outpacing those lost, but today, the World Economic Forum estimates a global net loss of 14 million jobs by 2027 due to technology, with 83 million roles eliminated and only 69 million created as the disruptive power of big tech and AI takes hold.
Amazon epitomises the destructive dynamics. The company has undoubtedly provided thousands of warehouse roles as it expanded, but even the Economic Policy Institute finds that opening a new Amazon facility leads to almost zero net employment growth in local areas. For every job Amazon adds, competing retail jobs disappear, resulting in no overall gains – just a shift from higher-paid, stable jobs in established local stores to lower-wage, precarious work in massive warehouses.
The retail sector in the US has been battered by Amazon’s dominance, with traditional shops shuttered and communities left dependent on unstable employment. In the UK, Amazon’s significant hiring ramp-up has been followed by painful reversals: in 2025, the closure of all Amazon Fresh stores resulted in hundreds of job losses, and the company announced 30,000 corporate cuts globally that same year. The gains are consistently fragile, as Amazon’s automation eliminates entry-level jobs faster than it creates them.
Google and Meta have channelled similar disruption into the media and advertising industries. Their rise to digital advertising supremacy has bled newspapers, broadcasters and publishers dry. Google earned billions from news content in 2018 without compensating the source publications, contributing to a severe decline in journalism. The last two years saw social traffic from Facebook to news outlets collapse 67 per cent, while similar drops from X (formerly Twitter) forced many outlets to slash staff.
In 2023 alone, at least 8,000 journalism jobs disappeared in the US, UK, and Canada – an unmistakable human consequence of Big Tech’s revenue siphon. Meta has dismantled direct support for news, ending funding programs and halting payments to publishers. Meanwhile, the small number of jobs created in ad sales and content moderation by Google and Meta do not come close to replacing the tens of thousands lost in journalism, publishing and creative fields. The result is a landscape dominated by precarious gig work, with far fewer stable careers in quality journalism.
Big Tech’s rush into artificial intelligence deepens the employment crisis. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 report, 40 per cent of employers expect to shrink their workforces as AI automates tasks in every sector imaginable. In the US, AI-linked layoffs surged in 2025, with over 62,000 job cuts announced in a single month – a 140 per cent year-over-year increase. Globally, tech companies eliminated over 100,000 jobs in the first half of 2025 alone, as executives prioritised efficiency and automation over human labour. In the UK, a recent KPMG study found that generative AI now directly threatens 10 per cent of all jobs, as digitalisation erases administrative and service roles.
McKinsey’s latest business survey reveals that employers are no longer optimistic about net job growth from AI adoption. By 2027, the World Economic Forum expects 26 million fewer administrative positions worldwide, while the high-paid jobs created by Big Tech’s AI investments remain concentrated in a handful of elite hubs like Silicon Valley and London.
The illusion persists: headlines trumpet tech job growth, but sector-specific gains are consistently dwarfed by the much larger losses in industries upended by big tech’s innovation and automation. For instance, despite forecasts from groups like CompTIA of a modest 1.4 per cent UK tech job increase in 2025, this uptick is overwhelmed by layoffs everywhere else. The new roles – almost exclusively high-skilled, highly educated and deeply specialised – are inaccessible to most workers affected by automation. Gig work and zero-hours contracts dominate the alternatives, offering little security, no benefits, and unreliable wages.
Data from MIT, World Economic Forum, Economic Policy Institute, KPMG, McKinsey and other sources paints a consistent picture: Big Tech’s rise is not a story of shared prosperity. It is instead an era of net job destruction, hidden behind the facade of innovation and economic growth. Amazon’s retail displacement, Google and Meta’s gutting of media, and the tidal wave of AI-driven automation have all contributed to an employment crisis marked by persistent anxiety and economic instability.
Policymakers can no longer afford comfort in the tech sector’s self-serving narratives. Reskilling programmes must expand rapidly, antitrust enforcement must become more robust and new revenue-sharing mandates must be explored to rebalance the playing field. Innovation should serve as a force for broad-based opportunity, not one that sacrifices millions for the profit of a select few.
Unless governments intervene, the job mirage will become a permanent reality – one driven by Big Tech’s efficiencies but haunted by widespread economic insecurity. The time for reckoning is now, before the consequences become irreversible for workers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The writer is former head of Citigroup’s emerging markets investments and author of ‘The Gathering Storm’.
