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The psychic cost of AI is already here
Ugh, another AI post.
Today Block laid of about half its 10k employees for AI reasons and the sock soared. Was this pr cover for shedding bloat? Maybe. Elon famously slimmed down Dorsey’s crazy bloated twitter, no AI cover story needed.
But still, the market loved this and will demand more.
Earlier this week IBM stock dived on some Anthropic COBOL skill. Was this premature doom? Maybe. But still.
Let’s put aside whether AI will destroy white collar work in a short term time horizon. Despite the outcome, the idea that it very much might is already mainstream. It’s in the water. How much is the impending fear already shaping decisions? How much psychological weight is it already causing? How much will it accelerate
Certainly people are already changing career plans, college plans, savings strategies, family planning, etc. and it will only get much worse. New broadly available opportunities in AI are not going to open up faster than the fear of AI disruption will spread; we are already in a spiral.
Like many in these spaces, I’ve been worried for a while now, but now it’s going mainstream and will cause aggregate changes in behavior which will have their own effects on society and the economy regardless of the first order effects of AI disruption.
As a minor example, my wife has wanted to move for a few years now. Unfortunately, we’re chained to a 3% mortgage without enough income to achieve escape velocity beyond moving sideways to pay more. We’re finally in a spot this year where we could be a little indulgent and justify moving into a house the right size for a young family of 7, even if means taking on some unoptimized mortgage rate increase.
But I can’t imaging compounding that risk with AI disruption. The music could stop and never start again. Our marriage is good, but my resistance causes its own minor stress. How many marriages aren’t so good, break down over things like this?
How many people don’t get married altogether, etc.
Regardless if Covid was just a flu, the real world response to the percieved threat was transformative. Regardless if AI is just a fad…
I was there. AMA
For the completely ignorant, such as myself, what is Block and why should I care? also, were they financially over-extended and this is just a way of reducing headcount and costs, but wrapping it up in "no no, we're not firing anyone because we can't afford to pay them, we're replacing them with our sexy new AI!"
Block is most well known for making the Square payment terminals and Cash App. The company overall is profitable but has been experiencing poor growth, leading to dissatisfaction among investors.
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