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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The tech oligarchs of course.
The Yarvinite program envisions a drastic population cull removing those who are no longer necessary as workers and/or do not have the resources to contribute to the economy as consumers by means of a “humane alternative to genocide”. So far as I can tell, that means mass death events such as pandemics and environmental collapse being allowed to happen by negligence so they don’t need to get their hands dirty directly. I assume this is one of the main drivers behind the Trump administration’s pro death policies - limiting research on, and access to, vaccines and other medication, rolling back anti-pollution regulations etc - given how close Vance and other members of the administration are to the Yarvinite movement.
In their bad SF fever dreams they envision those of us who remain as being controlled by their AI powered security bots. Meaning that, unlike traditional human staffed secret police and paramilitary forces, they never have to worry about them developing empathy for, or relationships with, those on the receiving end of the repression or mounting coups. These are the type of people who read Snow Crash not as a dystopian satire but a handbook for the type of society humanity should try to build. Musk, for example, has explicitly said he wants to fix the ‘empathy glitch’.
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Humans have a limited capacity to give a shit. I forget but it's a pretty small number we can juggle.
We're a really shitty species when it gets down to it but evolution is blind so here we are. I can't even imagine some 'other wordly or God' would create such a mess but maybe it's a child or something and we're just GI Joe dolls to them.
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Maybe it's just me, but It is hard to see anyone with a beard like that as a business/tech genius.
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He's not. He's a Musk simp and a robot cultist with delusions of grandeur. In other words, an evil moron.
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Thank you for this. I searched for that + pdf and quickly found it.
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When the AI can't plagiarize the code that's already in their code base, so they can actually create new things, what are they going to do then? This is like firing a bunch of people, and everything works for a little while, because the loss of institutional knowledge hasn't backfired yet.
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Sounds like a ponzi scheme. Get in fast, leave the dead leftovers for the sucker at the bottom. I'm going to coin a new term "ponzinomics"
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And reduced quality. Companies will save money but cutting head count, but they will also be producing much lower quality work while convincing themselves it's "good enough." AI slop is going to become the new normal, not just in creative spheres.
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Apart from Square are any of Block's other products making money? Perhaps Block only needs maintainers for Square and AI is just an excuse?
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Yeah, laying off nearly half your workforce totally screams "we're leveraging new tech" and not at all "we're almost broke, the VC funding dried up, and if we didn't make these cuts then everyone's paychecks would have bounced".
If your business can be replaced by automation, why do you have a business?
If your business can be replaced by automation, why do you have a business?
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A large part of the 60% who survive the cut will probably be looking at leaving too, as any company that make this kind of announcement, clearly is capable of cutting its workforce again, even if it doesn't actually make sense to do so, other than to bump the share price.
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It's one thing to disrupt this profession or that specific product (buggy whips, etc).
But AI is being both pushed and utilized to replace significant chunks of workers across many very different industries and job areas. And it's being done explicitly to maximize profits for the already-super-rich (unsurprising, but worth reiterating and remembering).
If anything, this feels closer to the industrial revolution but without the "silver lining" creation of a bunch of new, unsafe factory jobs for those who can be paid the least and whose complaints can most readily be ignored.
Now think about how bad stuff got in factories and mines before unions fought (and their members sometimes literally were killed) to get better working conditions. And how far the US has let things regress since then, with the messaging that we're all somehow "meant to be" on the side of the bosses despite actually being workers. Things got very bad, and it took a lot of hard work and grief to improve them, and now we're back almost where we started and facing down a similar-looking shift.
Jeez, maybe I made my coffee too bitter this morning. Ugh.
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Technology has been advancing explosively for only a very short period of human history and up until now it’s been balanced. Sure, the invention of the tractor replaced jobs but it created jobs. You have to mine the minerals and then process them into metals and then machine them into tractor parts and then sell the tractors to farmers and then deliver them and maintain them. People whose jobs were displaced by tractors could be trained for most of these new jobs relatively easy.
And at each step of technological development new jobs were created to replace the jobs that were lost.
This is different, very different. The jobs that will disappear are not going to create very many new jobs, certainly not enough to replace the people who are now unemployed. We’re looking at massive unemployment on a scale never before seen.
We could be planning for this. Our government could be planning for this but we’re just whistling past the graveyard assuming everything will be fine, just as it has been in the past. Buckle up.
And at each step of technological development new jobs were created to replace the jobs that were lost.
This is different, very different. The jobs that will disappear are not going to create very many new jobs, certainly not enough to replace the people who are now unemployed. We’re looking at massive unemployment on a scale never before seen.
We could be planning for this. Our government could be planning for this but we’re just whistling past the graveyard assuming everything will be fine, just as it has been in the past. Buckle up.
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Are there just a metric ton of AI trading bots that buy/sell on any mention of AI or are actual human traders actually this dumb?
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Then you just fire more people, use their salaries to pay for the more expensive tokens... Doh'
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The role that you are thinking of was actually called "computers", they were (almost always) women who would take mathematical equations and turn them into punchcards, and then physically wire the "electronic computer" components together, literally "transistor by transistor" except vacuum tubes.
Their role was replaced by transistors and by male math department dropouts.
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(Not referring to you but companies all-in on AI)
Its been done before, they lost a lot. AI costs a lot, and I don't mean in terms of processing.
Businesses have tried it again and again.
"
Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company, is preparing to hire more human workers after relying heavily on artificial intelligence for customer service did not produce the expected results."
(https://economictimes.indiatimes.co...alls-short/articleshow/121263692.cms?from=mdr)
Now they re-hired 700 people because they lost a fuckton.
and
"AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay" (https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/forrester_ai_rehiring/)
and
"Companies Are Quietly Rehiring the Workers They Replaced With AI" (https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/forrester_ai_rehiring/)
AI in its current form and state cannot replace workers. You just end up wasting billions upon billions. Never mind the fact that if people dont have a job, they cant buy your shit.
Oh and a huuuuuuge thanks to Amazon AI chatbot for refunding my purchase multiple times because Amazon refused to connect me to a representative. Im sure refunding many customers multiple times isnt costly right? And I cant be the only one.
ALL of these people are betting hard on AI. And are losing every fucking time. Like these people never bought a lottery ticket or visited a casino for fun only because if they did, they KNOW that the point is to entertain the user, while earning more by the players' loss. Instead they keep betting in hopes of getting back to square one or profit.
JFC
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I don't see it like that. We are life. We are the culmination of many hundreds of millions of years of multicellular life competing and cooperating and doing all its things.
We should take our behavior as the baseline and work from that. Not good and not bad. Then we can decide what to do next without pointless judgments versus some imagined fantasy ideal.
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The truly sad part is he got filthy rich from not pursuing meaningful pursuits. One of our major problems is that meaningful pursuits generally come with piss-poor pay packets.
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Fully agree, we're in for a rough ride. I know economists love to point out that technological disruption produces new jobs, but they really have nothing to say about who gets those new jobs, how long it takes to get those new jobs, and how badly displaced workers are treated.
And you're right about the scale of this thing, it's earth-shattering. I heard some speculation that AI is going to have a profound negative impact on the US debt because the gargantuan amount of corporate debt that's going to hit the bond market is going to send interest rates skyrocketing, including for Treasuries. That's a major disruption.
That's unpossible in this timeline.
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That's the gist of that Citrini Research thought experiment that (
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A bigger unemployed or underemployed underclass with more wealth concentrated on top. What could go wrong?
Maybe this is why the greedy oligarchs pushed so hard to get fascist elected.
A democracy might try to mitigate the damage to the plebs.
Maybe this is why the greedy oligarchs pushed so hard to get fascist elected.
A democracy might try to mitigate the damage to the plebs.
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It’s like comparing kitchen knives to Thermomix, and firing all your cooks to tell your chef to use Thermomixes instead.
Good luck with your restaurant.
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If I were more of a stock market person it would seem like a great time to short Block. Sure you may get more productivity on your # of commits or lines of code or what ever crappy measure of productivity you use but I do expect this will backfire spectacularly. Not sure if it will be technical debt from so much code no one really understands or loss of knowledge from turn over in a much smaller workforce or other factors I haven't even thought of but I expect it will happen. Going all in on bitcoin and now AI certainly sounds like a CEO who is chasing what ever buzz word makes the stocks jump up. I'm surprised he didn't sign some deal with AMD or NVIDIA to build 1.21 jigowatts of AI datacenters while he was at it. Seems like that's a great way to pump the stocks while you are at it.
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I think the biggest problem with this reasoning is how much the top are insulated from this. It will take so many decades for them to even get a splinter from their actions.
Square processes payments for millions of little companies and thousands of big ones. The big ones make up the majority of their profit so even if all the little guys go out of business the bottom line isn't hurt enough to worry yet.
Those millions of little companies staff are now mostly collecting benefits not paid for by the taxes that should have been coming from the companies like square.
With enough smaller companies going out of business eventually the bigger ones will start getting hurt too and cut staff.
With so few paying taxes and more needing support it could very well collapse governments as we know it.
The last big buyer will be the government but eventually that money has to dry up with fewer taxes and more benefits.
And AI isn't even that good. It's barely able to replace an offshore support center. The only improvement is better English as it fails to help you with your problem.
I'm off to buy all the shares I can in private military and palanter, I imagine they'll be one of the few doing well to squash any uprisings.
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If you are looking for high quality puzzles with original designs I highly recommend these: https://magicpuzzlecompany.com/
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User says “most CEOs are late” to realize how little this technology will actually affect employment.
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Well, because one action pays off immediately to shareholders. Tearing down is the fast road to return while building can be a long and uncertain path for everyone else, the market, and society.
"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."
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I wonder how many people are cataloguing the security flaws AI tools are prone to generate. I suspect they will be the only people who will profit from this madness.
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You'd think that.
At least in the US this is what the citizens want or are too lazy to vote against. Add in that nothing has been done since the New Deal about anything and yeah. Democracy ain't gonna save no one here.
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People are already on it. https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116080909947754833
The next scam will be to collect bounties from bugs deliberately introduced by real or faked AI submissions.
Bonus: Meta's "head of AI safety and alignment" gets her email nuked by AI.
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