While the exact impact of AI on the job market remains ambiguous at best, ongoing concerns about the impending apocalypse of AI-driven jobs are reaching a boiling point.
Last week, Twitter co-founder and Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced he was laying off 4,000 employees at his fintech company, telling investors that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to start and run a company.”
“The tools we’re building will allow even much smaller teams to do more and better,” he added, arguing that “the vast majority of companies will come to the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
Dorsey’s letter sent shivers down the spines of already nervous investors. This is despite critics continuing to question claims like Dorsey’s, arguing that AI is simply incapable of performing human jobs and that AI is simply being used as an excuse to implement brutal layoffs.
Regardless of Mr. Dorsey’s true intentions, his recent decision to lay off half the company has hit workers hard. It’s happening despite early red flags, as one former Block machine learning engineer told us. business insidertheir tasks are slowly but surely being made unnecessary by technology.
“At some point you look around and say, ‘Oh, I guess I’m not doing that much anymore,'” said the worker, identified only as Kenji.
“Certainly, I realized that I could be in line to be fired,” he added. “I didn’t think we were there yet.”
Despite this, Kenji was not shocked to be fired. As an example, he was tasked with building a system that would automatically detect fraud within a company, gradually reducing the need for human intervention over time.
“The first 30 seconds were terrible,” he said. BI. “But when I read it to the end, I thought, “Oh, I get it.”
Kenji’s experience is indicative of a broader trend that is unfolding in the technology industry. Big tech companies are making their priorities clear by committing to mass layoffs and pouring billions into AI.
Just earlier this week bloomberg Oracle reported that it plans to cut thousands of jobs to survive a funding shortfall caused by its efforts to build an AI data center.
This is a depressing reality, especially for Block’s employees, who were specifically directed by Mr. Dorsey to leverage AI. In a sense, Kenji argued, workers are essentially being encouraged to dig their own graves.
“Over the last year, there has been a strong recommendation to use all these AI tools, and we have been laying the groundwork for our own alternative tools,” he said. BI. “You show the tool once or twice how to do a task, and it can do it from there.”
But many pressing questions remain about the feasibility of AI and whether it can truly deliver the tasks CEOs want to automate. Some argue that tech companies are simply dealing with overemployment during the pandemic, making it look like AI is actively replacing jobs.
Dorsey’s claims that nearly half of his employees were fired because of AI sparked a lot of skepticism among former employees.
In an essay published by new york timesAaron Zamost, Square’s former head of communications, argued that “Block himself doesn’t know” whether AI is replacing jobs or whether the company’s announcement is “just a convenient, flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing.”
Former Block employee Jason Kirsch also tweeted in early March that “this is not about AI” and accused Dorsey of hiding “organizational bloat” with talk about AI.
The long-term fate of permanent layoffs in the tech industry remains unclear. The U.S. economy is actively shedding thousands of jobs each month amid continuing concerns about AI automation and the continued economic downturn that rattled markets this week, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The extent to which AI is contributing to this trend will continue to be hotly debated, but for those who helped lay the groundwork to replace them, it won’t be any easier.
“Even if I get a job tomorrow, I’m not at all confident that it won’t be automated within a few years,” Kenji said. BI.
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