Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/ai-layoffs-block-jack-dorsey/686304/

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.

Yang is a grifter and no one should listen to him. Companies will happily use any excuse to fire employees and create a perception of job scarcity so that they can rehire workers who are scared and desperate and willing to take less compensation for more work.

All of that said, AI is definitely being incorporated quite heavily into a lot of products. It's already caused issues with services we all rely on, and I hope we are able to hold companies accountable and stop patronizing them wherever possible. AI cannot do a lot of the things they are pretending it can and we are paying the price, not the companies responsible.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey, a Bitcoin and AI enthusiast, announced alleged that he was laying off roughly 4,000 workers—nearly half of the company’s workforce—due to AI.

Fixed that

I like yang.

Imagine losing your job to a recession that’s being masked by an AI bubble, and The Atlantic believes the CEO when they say it was because of AI

Good argument! You're clearly making a point here 🙃

Ai can't figure out I need to take my car with me when I go to the carwash.... The harder they lean into ai the more humans will be needed to fix the fuck ups.

Can't help but feel the doomsayers of AI are the least knowledgeable about its capabilities. No mention of model collapse, LLM memory ceilings, the massive infrastructure and resource cost of scaling AI... It's not the future if it's not sustainable. We just have to wait until the normies wake up from their dream.

I think it is the future, but the future is much slower getting here than people think and will likely be more bespoke than dumping the entire written contents of the English language into a computer.

Yeah and "fuckening" is clearly his attempt to bandwagon on "enshittification."

"Oh so catchy phrases need swear words in them now, I'll use the sweariest word and have the catchiest phrase!"

AI Doomerism is AI boosterism.