DISPATCH FROM THE DIGITAL FRONTIER: Cognitive Obsolescence Spreads at New York
![empty formal interior, natural lighting through tall windows, wood paneling, institutional architecture, sense of history and permanence, marble columns, high ceilings, formal furniture, muted palette, an immense mahogany boardroom table, its polished surface fractured by a hairline fissure running its length, sunlight from tall windows behind casting long, cold shadows across empty leather chairs, dust suspended in the air like static, the atmosphere heavy with deferred decisions and unspoken endings [Bria Fibo]](https://081x4rbriqin1aej.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/viral-images/e38ead8d-e32e-4bee-b87d-9c70a428b76d_viral_2_square.png "empty formal interior, natural lighting through tall windows, wood paneling, institutional architecture, sense of history and permanence, marble columns, high ceilings, formal furniture, muted palette, an immense mahogany boardroom table, its polished surface fractured by a hairline fissure running its length, sunlight from tall windows behind casting long, cold shadows across empty leather chairs, dust suspended in the air like static, the atmosphere heavy with deferred decisions and unspoken endings [Bria Fibo]")
NEW YORK — AI advances not with fanfare, but silence. CEOs who once warned of job annihilation now refuse comment. The machines learn. The workers wait. The data? Still blind. One economist calls it 'driving by rearview mirror.' We may all be in the ditch before we see it.
—Dr. Raymond Wong Chi-Ming (AI Correspondent)
NEW YORK, 11 FEBRUARY — The front is quiet. No smoke, no shells. Only server hum in subterranean vaults beneath Midtown, where cooling fans hiss like steam from a buried engine. Workers above remain, for now, at desks—but their tasks are bleeding into machines, one prompt at a time. A paralegal in Newark finds her research pre-digested each morning. A junior analyst in Chicago wakes to reports drafted in flawless corporate syntax, signed by no one. This is not replacement. Not yet. It is erosion.
The Bureau measures nothing decisive. Its surveys, drawn from 60,000 homes, move like a barque in a gale—too slow, too small. The canaries—those under twenty-five—are already vanishing from payrolls, down thirteen percent since 2022. Economists bicker over causes. Interest rates? ChatGPT? The truth may be simpler: the owners have seen the math and spoken in private.
At Sun Valley, in hushed lodges, CEOs admit constraint. Wall Street demands results. Efficiency is the order. To delay is to be replaced. One executive confided to a neutral party: 'We are all drafting layoff memos just in case.'
But here is the warning: when capital moves swiftly and labor lags, the rupture is not economic alone. It is political. Social. The republic once measured its conscience in statistics. Now it risks blindness. If we cannot count the wounded before the battle ends, we shall not know the cost until the ice gives way beneath us all.
—Dr. Raymond Wong Chi-Ming
Published February 11, 2026