New Delhi, June 15 -- AMERICAN TECH firms are in lay-off mode. Oracle, a cloud-computing wannabe, has just sacked thousands. Block, a digital-payments darling, is slashing more than 4,000 roles-nearly half its workforce. Amazon and Meta are trimming. From 2022 to 2025 they and five fellow tech giants scarcely added to payrolls. Total employment, tech-related and not, in San Francisco, the world's tech capital, has fallen by 3% since the start of 2023.

This, as bosses tell it, is not because the industry is in a funk. It is because the sector is in the midst of a generational boom, courtesy of artificial intelligence. Boosters argue that AI is getting really good really fast at the sort of work many tech employees perform-spookily so, as ...