Automation, layoffs, and the Potential new bridge between crypto and universal income
In late October 2025, Amazon quietly announced plans to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs. According to sources, the roles span divisions such as human resources, devices and services, and operations. While this number is a small fraction of Amazon’s global employees, it represents nearly 10 % of its 350,000 global corporate workforce, marking the largest reduction since 2022.
Amazon’s announcement came amid its CEO Andy Jassy’s stated drive to reduce bureaucracy and increase the use of artificial-intelligence tools to automate routine corporate tasks.
Yet Amazon’s move signals a broader shift: automation is beginning to supplant human roles entirely and it is becoming difficult for organisations to hold back on these changes that will enhance efficiency and productivity. The question now is happens when the economic model built on employment starts to break?
Automation’s Cold Logic
Automation always promised liberation. The washing machine freed generations from back-breaking laundry. Industrial robots freed factory workers from repetitive toil. But today’s automation is less visible, more pervasive. Artificial intelligence now drafts emails, writes code, monitors warehouses, and optimises logistics faster than humans ever could.
In Amazon’s fulfilment centres, AI is redesigning the work environment. Economists once reassured us that automation creates as many jobs as it destroys. But the pattern is shifting and new roles often require entirely different skills, or fewer people. The middle tier is becoming thin. The recent Amazon cuts serve as a microcosm of this shift.
When work disappears, what happens to the identity built around it? It is important that the world gets a grip on what this means for the mental wellbeing of everyone who has built their identity around their digital efforts. If AI is going to trigger a tsunami that will elimate desk jobs as Elon Musk believes than people need to be prepared.
The Quiet Crisis of Purpose
We are conditioned to equate work with worth. The Protestant-work-ethic that Max Weber articulated in 1905 still hums beneath a modern psyche: productivity as proof of virtue. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” the saying goes.
Yet the paradox deepens. Automation simultaneously glorifies efficiency and renders the efficient obsolete. A worker trains a system that will ultimately outperform them. The result is a cultural vertigo of overwork and redundancy and exhaustion.
For a generation raised to see their dream job as a life goal, being replaced by code is an identity crisis.
This new phase is morphing from the displacement of labour to metamorphose into the displacement of purpose.
Crypto and the Economics of the Unemployed Future
Enter the world of crypto, not as speculation, but as social experiment.
In scattered corners of the internet, decentralised projects are testing ways to distribute income directly to participants, bypassing traditional employers. These range from play-to-earn games that reward engagement with tokens, to data cooperatives that pay users for their attention, to small-scale experiments in crypto-based Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Some early examples:
- Circles UBI (Germany): a blockchain system where participants receive daily allowances of personal tokens tradable with others they trust.
- GoodDollar (Israel): a nonprofit project distributing small daily payments from a yield-generating crypto pool.
- Proof of Humanity (global): verifies real humans and issues them a weekly income in crypto.
These initiatives are tiny compared to national economies, yet philosophically daring. They hint at a financial ecology that rewards participation, presence, or simply personhood. And in an economy where Amazon is cutting 30,000 corporate jobs because automation reached them, the distinction matters.
The Case for (and Against) a Universal Wage
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is no longer fringe theory. Countries like Finland, and the U.S. city of Stockton, as well as pilot programs in Kenya, have tested versions of UBI. Advocates see it as a humane buffer against automation: unconditional cash that allows dignity in the face of disappearing jobs.
Crypto, with its capacity for borderless micro-transactions and algorithmic transparency, could be a tool for making UBI efficient. It offers a new infrastructure for distributing value without bureaucracy.
But there are obvious caveats. Crypto markets remain volatile. Token economies can replicate inequality as easily as fiat ones.
The Layoff as Cultural Mirror
According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 112,822 tech jobs have been cut by November 2025 across hundreds of companies. For decades, technology promised endless opportunity, now it forces us to imagine meaning beyond employment. It is high time to start planning for the psychological impact of these changes and how we can begin to unlearn the equation work = worth.
In a sense, the economy has become an experiment. Amazon’s automation labs, AI startups, and crypto projects are not isolated they are different expressions of the same question: How can humans live meaningfully when machines can do almost everything?
If automation takes away the necessity of work, perhaps the challenge is not technological but spiritual: What do we do with the time we gain? For some, the future may feel like exile. For others, liberation.
Imagine, years from now, a former Amazon corporate worker receiving a modest but steady crypto-based stipend, no longer bound to the rhythm of the assembly line or the office commute.
Automation, layoffs, and crypto together mark the end of one story. What follows is still being written, line by line, on servers and ledgers around the world.
