So. A few days ago, on October 26. Some 550 employees of Innodata in India, a company that labels training data for AI firms, logged in, marked attendance, and started a normal day.

By lunchtime, the HR portal had generated payslips listing that same day as the last working day. Laptops logged out mid-session. ID badges died. A letter arrived in personal inboxes, reportedly citing business requirements.

By evening, the fired were sitting in a WhatsApp group, five hundred of them, “clueless and in a state of panic.”

They were not fired the way you fire humans. They were decommissioned.

And this, apparently, is the up-and-coming management style of 2026.

Oracle: a 6 a.m. email, “today is your last working day,” severance followed by DocuSign, and savings go to the AI data centers.

Amazon: layoffs by email invitation to a “priority meeting.”

The CEO of Standard Chartered, Bill Winters, announced that AI will replace “lower value human capital,” then apologized for the words and kept the plan.

And my favorite, from a Resume Builder survey of 1,342 American managers: 65% now use AI at work, 94% of those use it for decisions about their people, and one in five lets the model decide who gets promoted or fired with no human in the loop at all.

Elon Musk, the Miskin.

February 2025, to Joe Rogan: “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

October 2026, about Anthropic’s new rules protecting its chatbots from abusive users: “cruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not ok.”

So empathy for humans is weakness, and empathy for software is duty... bumpy times ahead for those of us made of meat.

Unfortunately no.

Sara Konrath, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, pooled 72 studies in 2010 and found students scoring about 40% lower on empathy tests than in 1979, the steepest drop after 2000.

Gallup watched the share of US employees who feel their employer cares about their wellbeing hit 49% in May 2020 and fall under 25% by February 2022.

This year, Businessolver’s annual study found that 98% of executives rated themselves as empathetic leaders, while the share of employees calling their own culture toxic jumped to 40%. Executives in toxic cultures also report strong financial growth, nearly double that of those in healthy cultures. 

All of this despite “empathetic leadership” courses growing exponentially, with YouTubers and LinkedIn influencers alike advocating for this amazing word. 

Let’s start with the word itself. “Empathy” is barely a century old. Edward Titchener, a British-American psychologist, coined it in 1909 to translate the German Einfühlung, “feeling into.”

Before psychologists, we had a different word for millennia: compassion.

In Arabic, compassion is rahma, from rahim. The womb.

In Hebrew, a cousin language, compassion is rachamim, from rechem. The womb again.

113 of the Quran’s 114 chapters open in the name of the Compassionate, the Merciful.

A hadith teaches: “None of you believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.”

By tradition, the first hadith a teacher transmits to a new student is the “hadith of mercy”: “Be merciful to those on the earth, and the One in the heavens will have mercy upon you.”

In Judaism, Hillel the Elder, the great sage of the first century BCE, was challenged by a gentile to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot.

His answer: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

In Catholicism, the new pope picked the name Leo XIV after Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical told the first industrial revolution that workers are not commodities.

In May 2026, on that document’s 135th anniversary to the day, Leo published an encyclical on AI.

One line reads like it was addressed to Innodata’s HR portal: automated systems deciding on employment do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change.”

Our management patron saint said the same without the incense.

Peter Drucker, aged 92, published “They’re Not Employees, They’re People” in 2002.

On empathy, he was brief and powerful: “Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization.”

Trust does not mean liking each other; it means understanding each other. And from 1954, on the brilliant manager without integrity: “He destroys people, the most valuable resource of the enterprise.”

When the LLM writes the email and screens the CV, the human premium moves to whatever machines fake worst. Leo’s encyclical warns that simulated empathy builds only the appearance of relationships. 

The neuroscience agrees.

Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk and former molecular biologist, spent years in the brain scanner of neuroscientist Tania Singer. Their 2014 finding: empathy alone burns you out, while compassion, feeling plus action, builds resilience.

A manager’s job was never to feel more. It is to turn mercy into process. Catalyst, a workplace research nonprofit, found teams under empathic leaders report innovation at 61% versus 13%. And those fast-growing toxic cultures? Researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor calculated in 2015 that one toxic worker destroys more than double the value a superstar adds.

My forecast, comrades, free of charge.

Everyone is automating empathy at the exact moment it becomes the only management skill that cannot be provisioned.

Scarcity is pricing power; ask any economist.

The best managers of the AI age will be the ones who can sit in a room with another human being and stay human for the whole meeting.

Good stuff.

Talk soon.

Sultanbek