Your Job Probably Isn't Being Stolen By AI... Yet

Unless you've been living off-grid somewhere sensible, you've probably heard that artificial intelligence is coming for white-collar jobs. You've probably also heard reassuring counter-arguments about how ATMs created more bank tellers, and how the printing press didn't destroy writing as a profession. Both sides have a point. Neither side is telling you what to actually do about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNb_hC9Zzlk

Let's start with what actually happened last week.

Jack Dorsey's Very Honest Memo

On February 26, Jack Dorsey announced that Block — the fintech company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay — was laying off over 4,000 employees. That's nearly half the company's workforce, reduced from 10,000 people to just under 6,000. The reason, according to Dorsey's letter to shareholders: "intelligence tools."

To his credit, Dorsey didn't dress it up. He didn't claim restructuring headwinds or a challenging macro environment. He said the business is strong — gross profit up 17% year-over-year to $10.36 billion — and that a significantly smaller team, using AI tools, can simply do more. He then predicted that most companies will reach the same conclusion within the year.

Block's stock rose 17% the day of the announcement.

Now, to be fair — and fair is important here — not everyone is buying the pure AI narrative. Critics have pointed out that Block, like many tech companies, dramatically overhired during the pandemic, ballooning from 3,835 employees in 2019 to over 12,500 by 2022. Sam Altman himself recently acknowledged something called "AI washing" — companies attributing to AI what are essentially ordinary cost-cutting decisions dressed up in futuristic clothing. Some of Block's cuts reportedly included policy and DEI roles not obviously replaceable by a language model.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle — which is, unfortunately, where most important truths live. AI accelerated a correction that was already overdue. That's going to be the story at a lot of companies. And the AI part is only going to get more real over time.

The Substack That Spooked Wall Street

Two days before Dorsey's announcement, a macro research firm called Citrini Research published a 7,000-word scenario essay titled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis." Written in the form of a future macro memo dated June 2028, it described a world in which AI-driven white-collar displacement had pushed unemployment above 10%, triggered a 38% drawdown in the S&P 500 from its 2026 highs, and collapsed the $13 trillion mortgage market as high-earning professionals stopped being able to service their home loans.

The authors were clear: this was a thought experiment, not a forecast.

The market didn't care. The Dow lost over 800 points on the day the report circulated widely, with software, payments, and delivery stocks hammered hardest. DoorDash, American Express, KKR, and Blackstone all dropped more than 8%. TheStreet Pro A hypothetical scenario posted on Substack moved hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. That is either deeply irrational, or a signal that investors know something about the near future that they haven't quite priced in yet. Possibly both.

Citadel Securities published a robust rebuttal, pointing out that actual data on software engineer demand shows job postings rising 11% year-over-year in early 2026, and that daily use of generative AI for work shows "little evidence of any imminent displacement risk." Reasonable people are on both sides of this debate. The honest answer is that nobody — not Citrini, not Citadel, not Dorsey, not your LinkedIn feed — actually knows how fast this transition will move.

What we do know is that it's moving fast.

The Thing About General-Purpose Technologies

Here is the genuinely hard part of this conversation. Previous technological disruptions — the steam engine, electricity, the internet — were general-purpose technologies that transformed economies in ways nobody predicted in advance. AI is almost certainly more powerful than any of them, and it is emerging faster.

The steam engine didn't just make factories more efficient. It created entirely new industries, cities, and professions that nobody had words for in 1800. Electricity didn't just replace candles. It made possible refrigeration, cinema, air conditioning, and the entire modern built environment. The internet didn't just make communication faster. It created e-commerce, social media, streaming, cloud computing, and an entirely new class of entrepreneur who could build a global business from a laptop.

The jobs that AI will create in 2030 don't have names yet. That's not reassurance. It's just history repeating itself — at a faster frame rate than we've ever experienced.

So What Do You Actually Do?

Here's our honest take, offered with the full acknowledgement that nobody has a complete or definitive answer: the most durable response to an age of machine intelligence is human entrepreneurship.

Not because entrepreneurship is romantic or because hustle culture is making a comeback. But because the one thing AI genuinely cannot do — at least not yet — is want something. It cannot identify a gap in the market based on lived experience, get annoyed enough at a broken system to fix it, or build trust with a specific community of people who know and believe in you. Those are still human advantages. They probably won't be forever. But the window is open.

The economy will need new goods and services that we cannot yet describe because the disruption that creates demand for them hasn't finished happening yet. Someone will build the equivalent of Uber for a post-AGI world. Someone will create the new category of therapy, education, nutrition, experience, or community that a society navigating rapid technological change will desperately need. That someone could be you — but only if you're building rather than waiting.

Use AI aggressively, as a tool. Learn it the way previous generations learned to use spreadsheets or search engines — not because it's fun, but because fluency is the new literacy. And then use that fluency to create something that didn't exist before.

The canary, as Citrini put it, is still very much alive. The window to act is still open. The time to fly is now.

What will you build?