AI isn’t causing a jobs-pocalypse. At least, not yet
AI isn’t causing a jobs-pocalypse. At least, not yet
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/02/business/ai-tech-jobs-layoffs
Publish Date: 2026-03-02 05:00:00
Source Domain: www.cnn.com
New York
—
As if on cue, days after a viral essay warned of an artificial intelligence-fueled economic catastrophe, payments company Block said it was laying off nearly half its staff. The company, which owns Square and Cash App, explicitly linked the cuts to AI tools that have “changed what it means to build and run a company.”
That is a deep cut, even for the tech industry, which bulked up during the pandemic and has been shedding thousands of jobs in recent months. And unlike most of other industry cuts, executives at Block weren’t “right-sizing” or “reducing headcount in anticipation of future AI efficience” — the company adopted AI tools, and as a direct result, it says it no longer needs as many workers.
Block’s shares surged more than 15% Friday.
On the surface, the news looked exactly like what a viral, market-sinking blog post from Citrini Research speculated about earlier this week: Increasingly sophisticated AI is about to create a doom loop for white-collar workers, as “agents” replace office workers, leading companies to shed jobs and fatten their profit margins, leading to more investment in AI, leading to more layoffs.
But don’t let recency bias drag you into a pit of despair.
Some jobs, especially low-level coding, do seem to be under pressure as AI bots get better at mimicking human-generated software. And that is a real conundrum, especially for those who weaponized the words “learn to code” to taunt their fellow man on Twitter in the 2010s.
But is this an economy-wide phenomenon bound to plunge the world into a recession? No. Not yet, anyway.
While no one has a crystal ball to say for sure, we do have a lot of recorded history to look back on to say authoritatively that tech…
