He was once a $150,000-a-year metaverse engineer. Now he’s living in a trailer, delivering food to get by—another casualty in the wake of AI’s explosive rise.
Shawn Kay, a 42-year-old veteran software engineer with two decades in tech, never expected to end up in a small RV in upstate New York, scraping by with eBay sales and food delivery gigs. But after losing his job last April, Kay has found himself on the wrong side of a rapidly shifting tech industry—where ChatGPT is booming, and once-hot fields like the metaverse are growing cold.
“The silence wasn’t temporary this time,” Kay was quoted in a Fortune report. “It’s quieter, colder, more unsettling.” Despite sending out 800 applications, he’s landed fewer than 10 interviews—many with AI agents, not humans.
With a background in VR, AI, and web development, Kay once thrived in cutting-edge roles. But the generative AI surge has flipped the script. “I’m not anti-AI,” he says. “I’m an AI maximalist. I believe in its potential. But it’s being used wrong—replacing talent instead of empowering it.”
What’s happening to Kay, he warns, is just the beginning. He sees himself not as an outlier, but a signal: a glimpse of what could hit millions more as companies replace workers to cut costs. “It’s not about smarter machines—it’s about smaller thinking,” he says. “Businesses aren’t scaling innovation. They’re shrinking ambition.”
The numbers echo his concern. Formal interviews are vanishing, hiring processes are automated, and resumes are often filtered before a human ever reads them. Kay is now eyeing tech certifications or a commercial driver’s license—anything to restart his income. But even upskilling costs money he no longer has.