sebastien laye

The Economist says AI created a million jobs in America. I read that twice. Then I found out who's getting hired and it made total sense. For two years the only headline was the same one. AI is coming for your job. Learn to code was dead. Entry level was finished. Everyone under thirty was about to be replaced by a chatbot. So The Economist did the thing nobody else bothered to do. They actually counted. They lined up every job AI created against every job it killed. The layoffs first, because that's the part everyone was waiting for. About 200,000 jobs gone since mid 2023. Real people, real pink slips, companies openly blaming AI. Customer service down around 10 percent. Admin and secretary roles down about 15. That part of the fear was true. Then they counted the other side. Around a million new jobs. Five made for every one destroyed. I sat with that number for a second because it's the exact opposite of what I'd been told to expect. Then I looked at where the jobs actually went, and the whole thing clicked. The biggest winners of the AI boom don't touch a keyboard. They're electricians. Here's the part nobody explains. AI doesn't live in the cloud. The cloud is a lie we tell ourselves. AI lives in enormous buildings full of computers that run hot enough to cook an egg, and those buildings have to be built, wired, cooled, and fed more power than a small city. So the money went there. Around 320,000 more jobs than normal in the industries that build these things. Electricians. HVAC techs. The people who wire electrical equipment. Utility crews. Companies are so desperate for them that data center jobs pay about 40 percent more than the same work anywhere else. The white collar side grew too. Roughly 730,000 above trend in the jobs sitting closest to AI. Engineers, software people, data scientists, plus a wave of roles that didn't exist three years ago like the people who label training data and the ones who bolt these systems into real companies. Even the jobs everyone said were doomed kept growing. Paralegals up 11 percent. Market research analysts up 6. The national average was around 2. Now the honest part, because I'm not here to sell you a fairy tale. This is an estimate, not a government census. Nobody at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stamped a form that says one million AI jobs. The Economist built the number from employment trends and some careful guessing, and the two sides aren't perfectly comparable. The layoffs are announced cuts. The million is jobs above where the trend line said we'd be. And "created by the AI boom" is doing heavy lifting. An electrician wiring a data center is real work. It is not AI hiring a million prompt engineers. But strip all of that away and one thing survives. The apocalypse everyone promised is two years late. The thing that was supposed to erase work quietly built a small city's worth of it instead. We spent two years scared of the wrong number.