The current situation with artificial intelligence reminds me of an old joke. A pilot comes on the intercom and says: “Ladies and gentlemen, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that we’re completely lost and have no idea where we are. The good news is that we’re making excellent time.”
As AI keeps getting smarter and more capable, we find ourselves accelerating into an unknown future. We don’t know where we’re headed, but we do know we’re getting there fast.
That unknown future now clearly entails job loss. Large corporations across the U.S. are laying off thousands of employees as they integrate AI into their operations. In May, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, laid off 8,000. Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, is laying off 4,000 of its 10,000 employees.
Currently, those most threatened with job loss are software developers, thanks to Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.
You can give Claude Code a description of what you want, and it will go to work creating it—autonomously. It can divide the project into various tasks, and then assign AI agents to do them. One agent, for example, might write the code, another do the testing, and a third supervise everything.
Claude can work independently for a number of hours doing the coding and come up with a product that would have ordinarily taken days or weeks.
That means two things: Software engineers can now be hugely more productive, and … there are dramatically fewer jobs for entry-level programmers.
But it’s not just software engineering. In May, Anthropic released Claude for Legal, an AI offering that techno-optimist Peter Diamandis says allows a single lawyer to do work that previously took 100 or more.
Anthropic also released Claude for Small Business, which, they say, “puts Claude to work inside the tools small business owners already use: Intuit QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.”
Again, more layoffs. According to Anthropic, these tools for small business will allow Claude to do things such as “plan payroll, close the month, run a sales campaign, chase invoices, and more.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that half of all white-collar jobs will disappear within five years.
And the money is flowing. In the first few months of 2026, Anthropic’s revenue grew much faster than the previous year. According to estimates, they will bring in more than $40 billion this year—up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. For comparison, Google took about a decade to grow from $9 billion to $30 billion in annual revenue.
In addition, companies are not only replacing entry-level positions with AI, but there’s also now a trend to lay off mid-level managers. If AI and robots are doing more of the work, then fewer managers are needed.
Amazon is cutting some 30,000 corporate jobs in part because AI tools are expected to reduce the need for white-collar employees. The goal is to “flatten” the corporate structure, with a few top-level managers overseeing a smaller workforce that’s working hand in hand with AI.
At the extreme end, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block, has said, “In the most ideal case, there is no layer. Everyone in the company reports to me. That would be all 6,000.” He feels that AI can take over much of the coordination, information flow, and oversight traditionally handled by middle managers.
So where are we? Our plane is making excellent time but the passengers are feeling lost. Will AI and robots eventually do all the work, as some of the tech overlords say? What, then, will be the future of work?
No problem, the overlords say. We’ll have a universal basic income, which they typically refer to as UBI. People’s lives will primarily entail leisure. But some people object: Fine, I get a basic income while you get your billions. So CEO Elon Musk has been suggesting a future with “universal high income.”
Those on the plane then question, who decides who gets what? And they worry that it won’t be the government but rather the tech overlords who are making these decisions.
Or maybe AI will make these decisions. The tech overlords have acknowledged that they’re in a race to develop a “superintelligence” that exceeds human intelligence and will transform life as we know it. For the better.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I’ve been in touch with the control tower. I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that we will not be arriving at your expected destination. The good news is that we will be arriving at Shangri-La. I know you weren’t expecting to go here, but, trust me, you will enjoy it. Each of you will receive $1 million to spend.”
So maybe I could get into this.
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