We were reading some funding newsletters and noticed that AI-based startups were raising millions and tens of millions, even when they were barely out of the gate. It’s those AI pheromones.

Those are the FOMA investor (and founders) who succumb to their limbic brains – think impulse and addictive behavior, meaning that behavior, for example, that drives you to obsessively check your email or social media. Or launch an AI-based startup, start vibe-coding, and you’re off to the races! It’s that dopamine hit. You’ve learned a lot about AI, how it works. After all, you have been training it – to take your job.

In case you missed it: AMAZON PRIME VIDEO BLOODBATH, @Tech Layoff Tracker reports. “2,847 employees got the email at 6:47 AM PST “Your role has been eliminated effective immediately” Badges dead by 7:15 AM. Slack access revoked mid-sentence Senior engineers who built the entire streaming infrastructure. Gone The team that shipped 40% faster last quarter using Claude for code generation. Eliminated

“847 contractors in Bangalore just got handed their prompt libraries and deployment scripts. 14 remaining Seattle engineers to “manage AI-augmented offshore delivery”

“The kicker: those eliminated seniors spent 8 months documenting every architectural decision into internal wikis Every code pattern. Every debugging workflow. Every performance optimization trick. That documentation just became training data for the AI systems replacing them

“VP of Engineering sent company-wide: “This transition represents our commitment to AI-first development” Severance packages include mandatory 90-day non-compete clauses. Meanwhile the Bangalore team already pushed 12 commits using the extracted knowledge base. One former L7 told me: “I literally trained the AI that made me redundant.”

“If you’re at FAANG and not seeing this coming you’re already dead.”

And what’s to be done? We’ve never seen anything like this before!!!, the press is exclaiming. We will remind you that when startups were ‘disintermediating’ jobs and verticals in the Web 1 days, the warning went out that the internet was going to eliminate all jobs, everywhere. Well, that didn’t happen – au contraire, more jobs were created – yet here we are again hearing the same dire warnings.

Tech does have a way of creating as many, if not more, problems than it solves, and heads up, founders, that’s where founders who, to quote hockey great Wayne Gretzky, skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been, prevail.

Case in point, for example, “Meta AI glasses are recording YOU undressing and using the loo… while we watch from thousands of miles away, tech workers claim,” notes Daily Mail . “The tech giant boasts that its Ray-Ban glasses, which have built-in camera and microphones, are a product created ‘with your privacy in mind’ and gives wearers control over what gets shared and when.

“They also have an AI assistant which can be activated by saying the phrase ‘Hey Meta’.

“But the same assistant also automatically processes data from the glasses, including speech, text, images and at times video footage, which is then sent to annotators at Sama, a third party data company contracted by Meta in Nairobi, Kenya.

“That function cannot be turned off.”

Enter  Nearby Glasses, which “constantly scans for nearby signals that emit from Bluetooth-enabled tech, such as wearable devices made by Meta (and Oakley) and Snap,” Tech Crunch reports and which we’ve cited before.

The reporter mentioned that he “added a specific Bluetooth identifier (0x004C), which allowed me to search for nearby devices made by Apple — and my test device immediately flooded with alerts (as you might expect), likely picking up every Apple-made device in my near proximity.”

Nearby Glasses founder Yves Jeanrenaud said: “Of course, it’s a technical solution to a social problem (which is amplified by technology), and it won’t go away anytime soon,” and described the app as a “desperate act of resistance, hoping it would help at least someone.”

Or wake a lot of people up, at long last.

And a new vertical is born!

“We live in a world of always-on listening devices. Smart devices and AI dominate our world in business and private conversations. Today, we’re introducing Spectre I, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings,” @aidaxbaradari of parent company Deveillance revealed, and gotta love the company name!

Note to founders, when you see a problem coming, skate ahead of it. It’s called a much-needed solution.

As for the “AI taking over all jobs” problem, time to think outside of the box, meaning, that ‘box’ aka laptop or whatever device. sitting on your desk, and enter JoinNavi, a company that can point you to 500+ trade careers across every industry. While the focus may be on high school students considering what they want to do when they grow up, newly and not so newly minted college grads submitting resumes for jobs that will no doubt soon be taken over by an AI, can also benefit from suggestions those job seekers might not otherwise have considered. Navi is age agnostic, in fact, driving career changers to the platform as well. which is still in its early stages but live and getting traction. More career verticals coming soon.

It’s not doom and gloom in all verticals. There’s a desperate shortage of lab technicians, for example, who can easily command six-figure salaries.

If you believe these Navi founders aren’t on to something, this just in: “A dire electrician shortage is a ‘life or death’ threat to the AI data center boom—and an opportunity for Gen Z, says Fortune by way of DNYUZ, and there you have it. “With nearly 30% of union electricians aged 50–70 and 20,000 retiring annually, the U.S. needs over 300,000 new electricians in the next decade… Electricians in high-demand areas can earn over $120,000 annually, with potential to reach $200,000 with overtime or leadership roles.”

That’s just one alternative available besides taking up residence in one’s parents’ basement or couch surfing.

Doom and gloom headlines make for outstanding clickbait for articles no doubt written by AIs, speaking of disintermediation redux.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Peter Thiel once very famously said way back in 2011, and while the character count has been upped, still waiting for the cars. Although it seems those flying vehicles may hopefully be coming soon.

And for all we know, the next giant leap in that sector may come from someone who’s been made redundant thanks to AI, and shifted focus to a technical career that might not otherwise have occurred to him or her. Or that ‘taking all job’ thing may be resolved by another such a person who’d been made redundant.

After all, do keep in mind that other less-cited quote from Gretzky: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Onward and forward.