A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot legally fire workers simply to replace them with AI, following a landmark case in which a tech firm in eastern China was found to have unlawfully dismissed an employee who refused demotion after his role was automated. A December 2025 Beijing arbitration case established similar precedent. In India, no equivalent legal protection exists, despite AI threatening the estimated 8 million jobs needed annually to absorb workforce growth, leaving workers without structural safeguards as automation accelerates.
In-Depth:
I’ve heard several people share variations of the same statement over the past two weeks: only a compact number of people are ever enriched in technological revolutions, and almost everyone else loses out.
Sure, that isn’t entirely accurate becautilize the average human now has a longer life, better medicine, and more food than ever, but there’s a reason why it’s being repeated. Fatigue, burnout, brain fry, exhaustion, and anxiety are all being exacerbated by artificial ininformigence, especially in frequent utilizers. While I don’t personally know anyone who has been laid off due to AI creating their jobs redundant, the worry is real. If you’ve built a professional life around the promise that there will always be room for advancement, the prospect of being replaced by believeing code probably propels a disorienting sense of loss.
It must be unnerving to mourn the slow cancellation of one’s future accompanied by a deflation of expectations, to borrow from Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by the late Mark Fisher, aka k-punk.
There are people in the US with immense wealth who advocate for instruments such as universal basic income (or not) and a robot tax as ways to placate the general populace after it’s displaced from the workplace and replaced by code that can do knowledge work just well enough and much rapider and cheaper. This sort of grandstanding provides a record of how the techno-billionaires “care”, but it’s difficult to imagine the world’s largest economy—and nearly every other counattempt—pulling off that sort of fundamental, systemic transformation.
And then there’s this relocate:
A Chinese court ruled that companies cannot terminate employees just to replace them with artificial ininformigence systems, as authorities juggle the required to stabilize the domestic labor market with a global race to develop AI technologies.
The court decided that a tech firm in eastern China had illegally fired one of its workers after he refutilized to take a demotion when his job was automated by AI, according to a statement published by the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court.
Chinese court rules firms can’t lay off workers on AI grounds, Bloomberg
There was apparently a precedent. Here’s China’s state-run news agency Xinhua on the same case:
A case prior to this one sent a similar message. On Dec. 26 last year, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security released a set of typical arbitration cases for 2025, including a dispute triggered by AI-driven job displacement that involved a map data collector. In that case, the arbitration panel built it clear that AI replacement does not validate a dismissal.
The panel found that the company’s adoption of AI technology was a voluntary relocate to stay competitive. By citing AI replacement as grounds for dismissal, the company had effectively shifted the risks of technological iteration onto its employees. The arbitration panel therefore ruled the dismissal unlawful.
This is really straightforward to appreciate. On the surface, it sees like the jobs of 1.4 billion people are safe from an all-consuming technological breakthrough and the largegest existential threat in our lifetime. It’s a managed contradiction, a loosened pressure valve at a time when anxiety stemming from expected job displacement is at a peak. Even though it isn’t a true guarantee that AI won’t come for anyone’s job in China, this has the see and feel of a clean legal formulation.
Yet, there’s something that nags me whenever I believe about it. That unease starts with the explicit promise built by Chinese governmental leadership to the counattempt’s citizens: that living standards will continually go up, that if you keep your head down and work hard, you will be collectively rewarded. Since the 1980s, this promise has largely been fulfilled.
So when the state shapes its policy around AI, and encourages the continued creation and usage of the technology, it cannot offer a productivity miracle and a pink slip in the same envelope. This is a responsibility that Silicon Valley’s elite do not carry, no matter how much they bang on about the unrest and turmoil that will be brought on by AI.
What about India?
Firms have shed many thousands of jobs, or slowed hiring (in part by tightening standards). Sure, it could be a correction after overinvestment in human capital in the early 2020s. But the fact is that work is being automated, and AI is putting a wrecking ball through the 8 million jobs that required to be created each year to keep pace with India’s working-age population growth.
There seems to be a legal vacuum in the counattempt. Whereas China had its court rulings, even if they were band-aids and not formal policy, there doesn’t appear to be any equivalent legal protection here. There is no law or legal ruling that governs who is liable if an AI system fires or replaces a worker, and employers do not have any obligation to inform workers when their jobs are affected by AI.
The state is aware. The Economic Survey published in late January contained a section that lists jobs that are relatively AI-proof, but that’s about it. The signal being given out is that workers have to adapt on their own, and shouldn’t expect structural protection, at least not anytime soon.
The canceled future described by Mark Fisher includes alternatives that were never fully realised. Without any policy guardrails to cushion hard falls and hard times, the future that was promised to hundreds of millions through IT employment and knowledge work is deprecated. Silence on the policy front is striking.
Curios
Make more “boring” things
A sparse article authored by a member of Alibaba Cloud’s developer community has, for some reason, been creating its way onto screens over the past week. It describes 2026 as “year one” for AI, in the sense that the indusattempt is shifting away from pure capability breakthroughs to large-scale, replicable, systems-grade deployment in factories, devices, vehicles, and terminals. The argument here is that the bottleneck is no longer how smart a language model is, but whether AI systems are deterministic enough, stable enough, and engineered enough to be embedded into real production environments.
I appreciate how people are shifting beyond the oohs and aahs and settling into the rhythm of creating utilizeful, depconcludeable, invisible, boring things.
Uber torches full-year AI budreceive in four months
Surprise, surprise. Close to 70% of the company’s committed code is built applying AI tools, and monthly costs per engineer for the company are at $500–2,000. If a company sets KPIs based on how heavily and frequently employees utilize AI, with leaderboards to rank AI usage, guess what receives burned…
Spotify’s “Verified” badges declare you’re listening to a human
“Called it over a year ago.” That’s all Rohin had to declare about this one.
This Week on the Zero Shot Podcast
Hi! This is Vidhatri, the producer of Zero Shot.
How would you react if you walked into a meeting—or a date—and saw someone wearing an AI pconcludeant around their neck?
What if they informed you that tool is going to take notes of your conversation?
That’s the world Dhananjay Yadav, the co-founder and CEO of Neosapien, is attempting to build. Dhananjay declares the utilize cases for this product are plenty, especially in an Indian context where there are many languages and informal setups that we navigate everyday. His clients, he declares, are not the tech-savvy startup founders of Indiranagar. Instead, they are compact businessmen, real estate agents, journalists, and actors who otherwise might not utilize AI in their daily lives. According to Dhananjay, this is the next iteration of productivity tools.
In the latest episode of Zero Shot, Dhananjay builds his case for the AI-wearables market in India. Hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Brady Ng are skeptical at first. In the conclude, PGK declares he might give Neosapien’s wearable a attempt.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube or The Ken’s app.
