60,000.
That is how many workers Foxconn replaced with robots at its Kunshan factory in 2016. Sixty thousand people made redundant by machines that could do their jobs faster, more precisely, and without breaks, benefits, or wages.
The factory still runs. It produces more than it did before. It just does so in near-total darkness now.
They are called “dark factories” or “lights-out manufacturing.” By 2022, China had installed over 290,000 industrial robots, accounting for more than half the global total. The lights are off because, unlike humans, robots do not need to see.
From Hands to Minds
While automation displaces factory workers, cognitive workers face a different set of pressures.
Since 2022, major tech companies have initiated wave after wave of mass layoffs driven by shifting economic conditions, overstaffing corrections, and advancing AI capabilities. Globally, 783 layoffs occurred at tech companies in 2025, affecting over 240,000 people. That averages 674 people per day.
These are the same companies that have been vocal about reimagining how they value people. Salesforce has long championed “Ohana,” the Hawaiian word for family, as a guiding principle. At Meta, the HR department is called People Practices. At Google, it’s People Operations. Titles have evolved too: HR Director and Chief Human Resources Officer have given way to Chief People Officer and Chief Talent Officer.
Yet when layoffs arrive, the language becomes irrelevant. Whether called resources or people, the outcome remains the same.
The built environment industry follows the same logic through hiring cycles tied to project flow. When projects multiply, firms compete for workers. When they slow, those workers are released. The post-COVID period saw job postings surge 148.6% from 2020 to 2021, rise another 10% through 2022, then plunge 51.9% by January 2023.
The pattern holds: hire when needed, eliminate when not.
And Now, Management
The displacement now reaches judgment itself.
Companies including Amazon, Moderna, and McKinsey are eliminating management layers, flattening organizations, and deploying AI agents to automate routine work. PwC acknowledged that AI would automate many entry-level tasks, with juniors expected within three years to take on responsibilities previously reserved for mid-level managers.
The traditional career ladder is not just being shortened. It is being eliminated for many.
The traditional career ladder is not just being shortened. It is being eliminated for many.
The calculation is straightforward: junior staff paired with AI tools can now perform work that previously required experienced managers. Organizations are discovering that institutional knowledge and decision support, once accumulated through years of experience, can be provided by software in real time.
Across the economy, these massive changes reveal what the industry already knows: people are, to some extent, replaceable, particularly when their output and value no longer justify the cost of employing them.
There is nothing personal here. We are, after all, resources.
We Have Always Been Resources
The trend is not new. It is the acceleration of something much older.
For centuries, human labor has been treated as something to extract. The language has shifted from hands to human capital to talent, but the underlying logic has not.
Human value still hinges on capability and productivity. Performance reviews measure output against targets. Bonus structures tie compensation to deliverables. Even well-being initiatives are often justified by their impact on performance.
Each wave of technological advancement has sharpened this logic. Mechanization replaced muscle. Automation reached assembly lines and data entry. Now AI crosses into judgment, creativity, and management: the very domains on which the modern economy staked its claim for human indispensability.
What makes this moment different is not that the logic is new. It is that AI extends the logic to domains the design professions believed were exempt. When judgment, creativity, and management can be automated, there is no longer a domain that secures our value.
The Urgent Question
The real urgency is not that AI and automation can do what we do. It is that we have built an entire economic system on the premise that humans are resources. By deploying machines that produce the same output cheaper, we are proving ourselves right: we are vulnerable resources.
But that premise is not true.
There is something more essential about us, something that has nothing to do with productivity or output. Work has simply been organized in ways that systematically ignore it, suppress it, or treat it as irrelevant to the task at hand.
There is something more essential about us, something that has nothing to do with productivity or output.
Language changes will not address this. Calling people “talent” or “team members” instead of “resources” does not change the structures that treat them as such. The design professions need to answer what is essentially human about work, and understand how that answer should reshape practices. The industry needs to answer it now, before we structure work in ways that make the question irrelevant.
What Is Essentially Human About Work?
Consider design as one example.
Design is the creation of place for dwelling, spaces where human life can unfold, where meaning accumulates, where people belong. Three qualities make this possible:
Physical embodiment. We live in the world we build. A designer knows what it feels like to approach a building at dusk and sense whether they are welcome or warned away, to navigate a parking structure alone at night, to find relief in shade on a hot summer afternoon. This knowledge comes from inhabiting the world as a body among other bodies.
Relational knowledge. We understand human needs because we relate to other people. We know welcome and exclusion, comfort and intimidation, not as abstract concepts but as experiences with others. This knowledge is accumulated through relationships, not analysis. It allows us to create places that honor how people actually live together, not just how they theoretically function.
Stakes in consequences. We design because we will live with what we create. The buildings we produce shape how communities gather, how children play, how the elderly age, how the sick are cared for, how the dead are remembered. We grow old in the environments we design. Our neighbors are affected by what we build.
This is not just what makes design work human. This is what makes design itself possible. We create place because we inhabit place. The essence of design and the essence of being human are inseparable.
The essence of design and the essence of being human are inseparable.
What Does This Mean for How Work Is Organized?
The central question shifts: from how to protect jobs from automation, to how to organize work around human essence rather than output.
If stakes in consequences are essential, performance metrics that ignore long-term impact become inadequate. Projects should be evaluated not only at ribbon-cutting, but five years later when occupants have lived with the decisions.
If relational knowledge is central, collaboration becomes about collective judgment, not just efficiency. We must seek people who have experienced what occupants will experience.
If physical embodiment is essential, technical capability alone is not enough. We must value people who understand what it means to inhabit the spaces they design.
But these shifts cannot be cosmetic. Changing language without shifting the underlying logic, structure, and mindset accomplishes nothing. The shifts must show up in what gets protected when efficiency demands sacrifice, in what gets measured and valued, in who has authority, and how much time people are given to do work that matters.
This may mean accepting lower productivity by current measures, trusting different kinds of judgment, and valuing contributions that do not show up immediately in project margins.
This is not a philosophical problem. It is a practical one with real costs and real resistance.
This is not a philosophical problem. It is a practical one with real costs and real resistance.
From Question to Action
What would this look like in practice?
Some organizations are attempting different approaches. Rural Studio at Auburn University embeds architecture students in the communities they serve, building relationships over time before designing. Other practices conduct systematic post-occupancy evaluations, closing the loop between design intention and lived reality.
What would it look like in your context?
If you design systems, ask what your metrics reward. Long-term consequence, or only immediate output?
If you lead, ask whether you are trading human contact for efficiency. When automation offers speed but eliminates connection to impact, do you take that trade?
If you hire, ask whether technical capability is enough, or whether you seek people who understand what it means to inhabit the spaces they design.
If you structure careers, ask whether people move closer to the consequences of their work as they gain expertise, or further from it.
And for everyone: Does your work make space for your humanity or ask you to suppress it? Does it treat your embodied knowledge as essential? Does it give you contact with the consequences of what you create?
The answers will determine not just whether people feel valued at work, but whether buildings serve the people who inhabit them, whether design honors the communities it shapes, whether the built environment we create is worthy of the lives lived within it.
The question is no longer theoretical. Will we organize work around human beings, or will we continue organizing human resources around work?
What changes would you make in your own context?
What changes would you make in your own context?
References
Archinect. (2024). Economic Pressures and Labor Challenges: How 2023 Shaped Architecture and Construction Industries. Archinect News. https://archinect.com/news/article/150409382/economic-pressures-and-labor-challenges-how-2023-shaped-architecture-and-construction-industries
CNBC. (2025, October 23). AI is already taking white-collar jobs. Economists warn there’s ‘much more in the tank.’ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/ai-taking-white-collar-jobs-economists-warn-much-more-in-the-tank.html
Fortune. (2025, December 10). AI is taking over managers’ busywork—and it’s forcing companies to reset expectations. https://fortune.com/2025/12/10/ai-managers-automate-busy-work-org-chart-brainstorm-ai/
Hood, C. (2025, September 2). Why Middle Management will Fall First in the AI Revolution. https://chrishood.com/why-middle-management-will-fall-first-in-the-ai-revolution/
Layoffs.fyi. (2025). Tech Layoff Tracker. https://layoffs.fyi
Rural Studio. https://ruralstudio.org
The Tech Enabling China’s ‘Dark Factories.’ IEN RedZone. https://www.ien.com/redzone/blog/22948773/the-tech-enabling-chinas-dark-factories
Thompson, P. (2025, August). PwC is using AI to change the job of being an accountant. Business Insider.https://www.businessinsider.com/pwc-ai-training-changing-the-job-accountants-jenn-kosar-2025-8
World Economic Forum. (2025, September). Leading through AI disruption: What no CEO talks about. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/09/ai-disruption-leadership-ceo/
