Late last month, at an event in Washington, D.C., Andrew Yang delivered a bleak message. “I have bad news, America,” he told the crowd. “The Fuckening is here.”The Fuckening is the name that Yang, a former presidential candidate, has given to AI’s disembowelment of the workforce. As he sees it, millions of knowledge workers will soon lose their job, personal-bankruptcy rates will spike, and entire downtowns will turn vacant as offices hollow out. Yang has talked with computer-science majors, he said onstage, who can’t find a job and are instead “driving Ubers to make ends meet.” His doomsaying is extreme but familiar: Fears of job losses are mounting as AI continues to rapidly advance. A new generation of AI agents are more capable than traditional chatbots of assisting with sophisticated computer work. Bots are no longer limited to searching the web and answering questions—they can create financial models, generate slide decks, and much more.Perhaps the most concerning sign yet of an impending jobs crisis came one day after Yang’s announcement. The payments firm Block, which operates Square and Cash App, announced that it was laying off roughly 4,000 workers—nearly half of the company’s workforce—due to AI. “The intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working,” Block CEO Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, wrote. Going forward, he added, the company will be laser-focused on integrating AI across layers of its operations.Although other companies have also blamed AI for job cuts, Block’s layoffs were unusually drastic. “The dreaded AI jobs wipeout got real,” The Wall Street Journal declared. Other companies could soon follow Block’s lead—not necessarily because the technology is ready to replace workers, but because it’s become fashionable to make such cuts. In that sense, AI-induced job loss risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.Dorsey’s explanation for the layoffs at Block might not be the whole story. The company could be engaged in “AI-washing,” or using the technology as a convenient excuse to lay off workers when other factors may be to blame. Like many other tech companies, Block became bloated during the pandemic—its workforce more than tripled from 2019 to 2022. Perhaps the cuts offered Dorsey a way to shed workers while also signaling to the world that he is taking AI seriously. “It is hard to imagine a firm-wide sudden 50%+ efficiency gain that justifies massive organizational cuts,” Ethan… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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