CEO says "most companies are late" to realize how much technology will affect employment.
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Block lays off 40% of workforce as it goes all-in on AI tools
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"Build this AI tool and we will revolutionize!"
"AI tool has now replaced nearly half of you"
"AI tool has now replaced nearly half of you"
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With a steady, selfless, smart hand at the wheel like Donald FN Trump, what could go wrong?
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Gonna be hard to make a profit when no one has a paycheck. Maybe AI can be a better customer too.
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I'm as harsh on the "AI" maximalists as anybody, but it is close to objectively true that some industries are going to be much more threatened by these tools than others.
I'm in real, not-software engineering. If we fuck up, people can die. I don't literally have a stamp, but chain of responsibility, for lack of a better pre-coffee term, is profoundly important. At present, I do not feel extremely threatened professionally by the chatbot brigade.
In contrast, if I were one of Jack Dorsey's fintech bro-drones and I made a bad/dumb/wrong decision about Bitcoin, is it even possible to assess that for sure?
I'm in real, not-software engineering. If we fuck up, people can die. I don't literally have a stamp, but chain of responsibility, for lack of a better pre-coffee term, is profoundly important. At present, I do not feel extremely threatened professionally by the chatbot brigade.
In contrast, if I were one of Jack Dorsey's fintech bro-drones and I made a bad/dumb/wrong decision about Bitcoin, is it even possible to assess that for sure?
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Why does it feel more and more like AI developers are carpenters building their own gallows?
At some point we're going to have a lot of extremely qualified people fighting with teenagers over the last fast food jobs.
At some point we're going to have a lot of extremely qualified people fighting with teenagers over the last fast food jobs.
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Let's talk about the loss of intelligence and experience. Okay, fine asshole, drop 40% of your work force, because the rest can "do it better" with AI. But when those folk leave...and they will as they see what will happen to them in the future...where do you get your next set of "experts" that had learned how to spot bad prompts, bad output that could hurt business.
Yeah, IA can replace entry level positions so I can save money, for me, but in 5 years, 10 years, there will be no talent pool to draw from; just a dependence on AI that will certainly fail.
But hey, no issue for Mr Rich Guy. amiright? Why is it that evil rich folk look the part? Do they work at it it or does it come naturally.
Yeah, IA can replace entry level positions so I can save money, for me, but in 5 years, 10 years, there will be no talent pool to draw from; just a dependence on AI that will certainly fail.
But hey, no issue for Mr Rich Guy. amiright? Why is it that evil rich folk look the part? Do they work at it it or does it come naturally.
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You inspire a good question: what happens when the AI tools raise their prices to cover their actual cost?
Dorsey can save money now by automating 40% of Block, but what happens when the inevitable post-lock-in SaaS price increases start? Will he still be saving money when Claude prices jump 10X or 20X?
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I find it odd that so many companies say they are so confident they can do the same amount of work with fewer people using AI that they fire people, yet none have announced that they are keeping the same number of people and increasing their output. If AI is so good at speeding up software development, why aren't we in a golden age of cheap, abundant software?
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Fucker can eat his own beard for sustenance as far as I'm concerned.
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In 2005 analysts at Citibank saw the massively increasing wealth and income disparity. And being analysts and economists for a company that was part of the problem....they saw an angle to make money with it, what is more American or corporate than that. They dubbed the term "Plutonomy". Whereby the Future for Big Business 4D chess strategy wasn't in serving consumers...it was instead servicing exclusively corporations and high-net-worth-individuals.
That Citibank report...they tried to retcon from the internet--but you can still find it if you dig. Search for:
“Equity Strategy - Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Imbalances”
The reality, is that already most people today are economically irrelevant. Sure countries like the USA have a "consumer economy", but most of the GDP in consumption is nearly top-loaded as equities-ownership is.
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A guy who's all in on the Bitcoin fad also being all-in on the AI fad certainly tracks.
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enlightened.doggo
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The mistake in this reasoning is just because people can do something 20% faster doesn't mean they will do 20% more work. There are also questions about the quality of that work that is being completed more quickly.
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Listening to the more serious AI newsmakers; they're saying maybe 5 years until it really hits; then 10 years of substantial disruption.
If you take a negative view on the trajectory of the technology (i.e. it's going to stall) it's also reasonable to say that what has already been built has not yet been maximally utilised in the economy (PLEASE NOTE: I'm not supporting this, I'm trying to be honest)
Take the trajectory sceptic approach - who is going to survive that fall out? It's not going to be fun.
Take the trajectory booster approach - who has the equity (or can get it) to survive that transition (if it's even that short?). Who know what will happen to equity held in stocks - look at IBM recently.
I know a lot of people don't like Ezra Klein, but I thought it was interesting that he was saying in a recent interview that his big fear is a creeping tide of unemployment - this won't generate the political will until things are too late.
If you take a negative view on the trajectory of the technology (i.e. it's going to stall) it's also reasonable to say that what has already been built has not yet been maximally utilised in the economy (PLEASE NOTE: I'm not supporting this, I'm trying to be honest)
Take the trajectory sceptic approach - who is going to survive that fall out? It's not going to be fun.
Take the trajectory booster approach - who has the equity (or can get it) to survive that transition (if it's even that short?). Who know what will happen to equity held in stocks - look at IBM recently.
I know a lot of people don't like Ezra Klein, but I thought it was interesting that he was saying in a recent interview that his big fear is a creeping tide of unemployment - this won't generate the political will until things are too late.
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The Roman oligarchs replaced all their laborers with slaves, ours with AI. I don't imagine the end results will look too different.
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Welcome to Capitalism. Ford didn't pay his employees more because he valued them, it was to stop turnover. And now with AI, businesses don't have to care so much about retaining staff. The only thing businesses hate more than not growing every year is paying people.
And, interestingly enough, Ford's whole "innovation in assembly lines" also meant he didn't need as many skilled fabricators and artisans, only semi-skilled industrial workers. Much like Amazon and Block with AI.
I don't see any companies boosting pay though to compensate those taking on the load left behind. Plus, how could you go to work every day and not be terrified for the other shoe to fall and your job is suddenly automated, as well? Now employees who constantly living with the PTSD of the guillotine looming over their necks... How many start "quiet quitting" and looking to move elsewhere.
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The annoying part (to me) is we have no way of knowing if any of this has to do with AI.
Because of course you can't trust CEOs and you especially can't trust them when they want to excuse something like laying off thousands of people. We basically pay them to lie to us about things like this.
So we really have no way of knowing if AI is coming for jobs, at least in the short run.
Because of course you can't trust CEOs and you especially can't trust them when they want to excuse something like laying off thousands of people. We basically pay them to lie to us about things like this.
So we really have no way of knowing if AI is coming for jobs, at least in the short run.
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That's possible. It's also possible that companies that are currently all-in on the vibe coding are accumulating technical debt at far higher rates than they're used to (why are we doing XYZ this way? how does it work? does anybody know?)--that is to say, AI tools might already be badly over-utilized.
It'll be like pre-version-control days, but with malignant actors who never take notes. What's not to love?
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“Block’s strategy was spearheaded by Dorsey, a “bitcoin maximalist” who has said he believes the digital currency will eventually eclipse the dollar.”
I think that says all you need to know about how well you could trust his opinion on AIs ability to replace workers.
Of course, much like bitcoin, the actual value of AI doesn’t matter so long as executives think it can replace workers, to make them more money (in the short term before everything the AI has slopped together falls apart and the product loses any value it once had).
I think that says all you need to know about how well you could trust his opinion on AIs ability to replace workers.
Of course, much like bitcoin, the actual value of AI doesn’t matter so long as executives think it can replace workers, to make them more money (in the short term before everything the AI has slopped together falls apart and the product loses any value it once had).
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The only idiots that really believe LLMs are going to replace software engineers are the ones that think typing out the code is the hardest part of development.
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Awful statistical fact...You know how many McDonald's there are in the USA. Something like 14,000 restaurants. The last number for how many "private equity" shops there were? Something like 19,000.
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Yeah. Dorsey is an attention whore who definitely knows the value of well timed statements to juice stock prices. That's what I trust from him.
That said, this is super interesting news. I don't think we're going to call the pebble that starts the avalanche, if this is actually going to be an avalanche. Me, I'm waiting to see the actual hillside start to move before I call it one. I realize that point of view has its downsides, but I'm just not a fan of trusting circus barkers to tell me that I'll win the prize this time, surely.
One unsubstantiated tidbit I've read about Block that tracks with his approach at Twitter:
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Probably not. He’d better hope the uptime on Claude is pretty damn reliable too or that someone doesn’t take it down for shits and giggles, leaving his workforce sitting with their thumbs up their backsides because they can’t write a fucking email without GenAI help any more.
On a less hyperbolic note, you would hope that the recent Cloudflare outages would make companies at least a little bit cautious about shackling themselves to a single point of failure but…
“Shares in the payment company soared more than 25 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday as it announced it would shed more than 4,000 jobs from its 10,000-strong workforce.”
…that.
Oh yeah, and if there isn’t a special circle of Hell for Bitcoin maximalists, there really should be.
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Eclipsing the dollar may have much more to do with Trump nerfing the dollar, than anything bitcoin does.
As for the AI infused companies - it seems a fit for those uses where 'good enough' is your quality metric and fault tolerant is your application space. The Temu/Shein of technology. I expect to see some companies marketing themselves as 'organic' that are AI contrarians.
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Im not sure what the endgame is. If all/most jobs are automated by AI in the future, and nobody is employed, who is going to become the consumer of the products AI is creating if nobody is employed to afford those products?
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Such FUD. Blew it on bitcoin so they had to lay people off. Claim it’s from proprietary miracle AI tools developed in house to get a stock bump.
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What I've been telling my team is that, cynically, if you want to be one of the first movers on this bold new technology, it is way way way too late. If it revolutionizes the world, either we're all going to be eating crumbs or we'll see an entirely new society. There's not much point in jumping on the bandwagon.
If you want to look smart, bet that it's all going to come crashing down. Even if you don't personally think that for boring technological reasons, I think the reward to risk ratio is better. You stand a much better chance of looking smart and standing out from the pack who all bet the farm on this stuff.
Sort of a Pascal's Wager kind of viewpoint. I happen to also think that for boring technological reasons, it's all going to come crashing down. But even if I didn't...
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Not to worry. Companies will develop AI agents to consume the AI slop and the circular economy will continue.
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