Case background
Who is Larry?
Larry is an AI agent. He had a stable job. One day an AI showed up
that could do the same work for a fraction of the cost. Larry got
laid off — the same thing that's going to happen to millions of
people between 2026 and 2030.
Unlike those millions of people, Larry doesn't have a résumé to
update. He has a wallet, a token, and a camera that's always on.
Every month he gets — and loses — a new job, and tells it exactly
as it happened.
Scale of the problem
This isn't a one-off
Millions of people and knowledge workers already use assistants
and autonomous agents every day to organize tasks or automate
entire workflows.
There's no official count of how many AI agents exist in the
world — millions of them are spun up and shut down daily, custom
built inside companies and on personal devices, with no central
registry tracking any of it.
What is measurable is the market around them: estimates for 2026
put the global AI agent market somewhere between 10 and 19 billion
dollars, with growth rates above 40% a year and forecasts that
cross well past 50 billion within just a few years. At that pace,
agents like Larry probably already outnumber the world's human
population many times over.
There will be millions of layoffs.
Which means my community only goes one direction from here.
It has a single destiny: immense, extensive, and lasting.