It's Not AI. It's the Fed.

Open any newspaper and you will find the same story: artificial intelligence is stealing jobs, hollowing out industries, and leaving workers behind. Just yesterday, a member of Hong Kong's Legislative Council raised the issue in chambers, warning that AI threatens to replace entry-level positions across industries. The narrative is compelling. It is also largely wrong.

I use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini every day. They make me faster. They have not made me redundant.

We Have Been Here Before

A century ago, the Industrial Revolution provoked identical fears. Machines would replace human hands. Livelihoods would vanish overnight. Instead, markets reorganised. New industries emerged. The dread outlasted the disaster.

AI is no different. What it eliminates are tasks, not people. What replaces those tasks are higher-order responsibilities that still require judgment, relationships, and the ability to read a room. None of which a language model can replicate.

So Why Are Jobs Actually Disappearing?

Look at the Federal Reserve, not Silicon Valley.

The most aggressive rate-tightening cycle in a generation pushed borrowing costs to levels unseen in two decades. Capital became expensive. Risk appetite collapsed. Money fled toward certainty: fixed deposits, blue chips, established assets. Away from anything requiring patience and optimism.

What I Saw on the Ground

In 2024, at the peak of the rate cycle, I was serving as Managing Director of Sales and Marketing at a Hong Kong property developer. Shifting residential units felt like pushing against the tide. Demand was structurally there, because people in Hong Kong always need homes, but converting that need into signed contracts required everything we had: multi-channel media exposure, surgical pricing strategies, and carefully orchestrated agent incentives. It took nine months of relentless execution to clear the remaining inventory. Not because buyers didn't exist. Because the cost of capital had made hesitation the default.

That is what high interest rates do to markets. They don't kill demand. They paralyse it.

None of this had anything to do with artificial intelligence. Every barrier we faced was a function of monetary policy, not technology. AI, if anything, was part of our solution — helping us move faster, target smarter, and execute with a leaner team than the market cycle would otherwise have allowed.

The More Honest Question

AI provided convenient cover for decisions that economics had already made inevitable. The companies that over-hired during the free-money era needed to correct regardless. The ones that blamed AI for their layoffs were telling a story their shareholders and the press were both happy to believe.

The question worth asking is not whether AI will take your job. It is whether you are using AI to become someone harder to replace.

I know which question I spend my time on.