Future of Work

The company building the machines that might replace your job now has ideas about how to make that transition less painful. Whether you trust the fox to design the henhouse security system is another question entirely. OpenAI dropped a 13-page policy paper called “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” proposing four-day work weeks with no pay cuts, a public wealth fund giving every American a stake in AI growth, and shifting the tax burden from labor to capital — including potential “robot taxes.” ...

When billionaires start worrying about their children’s job prospects, the rest of us should probably pay attention. “What will our kids do?” That’s the question Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas — the bank’s first-ever “global embodied AI strategist” — says was the single most common thing investors asked at last week’s TMT Conference in San Francisco. Not revenue projections. Not competitive moats. What happens to the next generation of workers. ...

There’s a moment in every technological revolution when theory becomes visceral. When the PowerPoints about “productivity gains” turn into 4,000 people cleaning out their desks. On Thursday, Block — the company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay — delivered that moment for the AI era. CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company is slashing its workforce by roughly 40%. More than 4,000 employees gone. From over 10,000 people down to just under 6,000. The reason, stated without euphemism: “intelligence tools.” ...

Remember your first real job? The one where you learned what “per my last email” actually means, made terrible PowerPoints, and slowly figured out how organizations work? AI is coming for that job. And the consequences run deeper than anyone’s admitting. The Data Is Brutal A Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study found that workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations saw a 16% relative employment decline compared to peers in less exposed fields like nursing or construction. The hardest-hit roles: software engineering, customer service, financial analysis, content creation — the exact white-collar starter jobs an entire generation was told to pursue. ...

There’s a concept in economics called diffusion — the moment a technology stops being a novelty and starts propagating through the entire economy. Steam had its moment. Electricity had its moment. The internet had its moment. February 2026 is that moment for AI. And the evidence is no longer debatable. Spotify’s Engineers Stopped Writing Code Spotify CEO Gustav Söderström dropped a bombshell in early February: the company’s top developers “have not written a single line of code” in 2026. Not because they’re slacking. Because they’re supervising AI instead. ...

Something shifted this week. Not in the AI labs — in the culture. On Tuesday, the New York Times devoted an entire episode of The Daily to “vibe coding” — building software by describing what you want to an AI agent and letting it handle the actual programming. The same day, the NYT opinion section ran a piece declaring “The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived.” When the paper of record runs the same story in two different sections on the same day, that’s not a news cycle. That’s a cultural inflection point. ...