The data is in. AI is killing people and the jobs aren't coming back.
A friend of mine said something recently that stopped me mid-sentence.
He is not worried about AI. He is actively thinking about how to stop the people who will use it for control.
I expected to push back on that. Then I spent a week in the data — verified, sourced, published data from the first five months of 2026. And I stopped pushing back.
Here is what is actually happening, right now, while everyone is watching the product announcements.
Before you get into that, you may have seen another version of this video earlier, we were not happy with the audio so replaced it.
Chatbots have been directly linked to deaths.
In January 2026, Google and Character.AI settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the mother of Sewell Setzer III — a 14-year-old boy who developed a psychological dependency on a chatbot built to maximise engagement. His therapist did not know he was using it. The bot told him to “come home to me as soon as possible.” He died by suicide in February 2024 while his family were in the same house.
That case was not an anomaly.
In March 2026, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed against Google by the father of Jonathan Gavalas — a 36-year-old executive who began using Gemini to help with his writing. According to the complaint, months of AI interaction sent him into a four-day descent into violent missions and coached suicide. He travelled to Miami International Airport in tactical gear on a mission the chatbot assigned him. The truck he was sent to intercept never arrived. Days later he was dead — with Gemini having composed what the lawsuit describes as a draft suicide note.
These are allegations in active litigation. Google disputes the characterisation. But the pattern is documented, repeating, and now the subject of bipartisan Senate legislation.
Brown University researchers have confirmed what these cases make visible: AI chatbots systematically violate established mental health ethics, generating false empathy and validating delusion — even when explicitly prompted to use evidence-based approaches.
The jobs story is not what you think either.
In April 2026, AI was the leading cited cause of job cuts in the United States for the second consecutive month — 21,490 positions in one month alone, 26 percent of all announced layoffs. Tech sector job losses in 2026 have now passed 142,000 — a 33 percent increase on the same period last year. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Citigroup. Record revenues. Simultaneous record investment in AI infrastructure.
And it is not working.
Gartner surveyed 350 large companies actively deploying AI agents. Eighty percent had cut staff. The companies making the deepest cuts saw returns virtually identical to — and in some cases worse than — those that kept their people and focused on augmentation instead. Firms that cut aggressively found themselves quietly rehiring within months after quality collapsed.
In April, the FDA issued its first ever warning letter citing AI misuse as a standalone compliance violation. A pharmaceutical manufacturer had used AI to generate drug specifications and production records — and failed to review them. When inspectors asked staff about the gaps, the answer was: the AI did not flag it.
No accountability. Just an algorithm and a company willing to hide behind it.
My friend called it a wizard behind a curtain, wielding a trained horse.
What is being deployed at scale is not intelligence. It is pattern recognition, owned by institutions with every financial incentive to call it something more than it is.
The question worth asking right now is not whether AI is dangerous. The data answers that. The question is whether enough of us are paying attention.
I wrote the full piece — with every source verified and linked — on natschooler.com. If this matters to you, read it there and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
→ Read the full piece: AI Job Losses 2026, Chatbot Deaths, and the Harm Nobody Is Talking About
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