Like Clockwork

“The narrative that AI will destroy jobs is very destructive. We should be telling a different, more positive story.”

I’ve seen that sentiment among a dozen major social media accounts in the past week or so. It was like they had a meeting to talk about how to post about it.

Alas, I didn’t get the memo, and wasn’t invited to the meeting. My calls are with people who are freaked out about what their kids are going to do for work.

Part of it was that many of the bigwigs in tech have figured out that AI is . . . becoming deeply unpopular. It has a 26% approval rating, which is below just about every institution, including ICE. Data centers are being protested around the country. Two people even decided to take a shot at Sam Altman’s house (which is terrible, violence is not the answer). The industry has spent $150 million in PAC money to purchase compliance from the two major parties, but that hasn’t stopped ordinary people from coming to their own conclusions.

As one person online put it, “Okay, you’re saying that this is going to take our job and MIGHT kill us all . . . why am I supposed to be excited about this again?”

As you know, I’ve been deeply concerned about the impact of AI on employment for years, ever since I published ‘The War on Normal People’ back in 2018. People ask me all of the time, do I feel bullish or bearish on those projections now?

I answer, “It’s going to be even worse than I thought, because I imagined you’d have a government or public sector that is trying to mitigate the obvious harms of the displacement of labor.” Instead, you have an administration that is out to lunch on the potential impact and a multi-trillion dollar bet on the acceleration of AI that is the biggest outlay of capital in the history of business.

More money is now being spent on data centers than on commercial office buildings. If that isn’t the clearest metaphor for computers replacing human beings, I don’t know what is.

Yet, that is not something that ordinary people and families are going to like. So the new message is, “AI will augment and amplify human productivity, not replace it,” or “AI will automate tasks, not jobs.”

What’s the reality?

Part of the problem of today is that, in today’s information ecosystem, reality is a secondary or tertiary concern compared to what the perception is. It’s less important what is happening to millions of white-collar workers in real life than what the narrative is out there.

And yet, real life continues. This past week, Cloudflare announced that it was laying off 20% of its staff and attributed it partially to AI. Coinbase made a similar announcement.

I’m a numbers guy, and $700 billion is on track to be spent in 2026 by the hyperscalers on AI infrastructure including data centers. A major sports arena costs a couple billion or so. So imagine 7 new sports stadiums being built in every one of the 50 states this year and you have a sense of the scale of the investment. The only way to make those numbers work would be to replace millions of workers in corporations big and small in addition to efficiency gains or productivity growth. Simultaneously, you have mass layoffs at Oracle, Meta, Block and on and on.

These companies are voting with their wallets. It’s a bit like parenting; kids take their cues based on what their parents are doing, not necessarily what they’re saying.

It’s clear what these companies believe about the future based on their actions. No amount of spin is going to change that.

I interview Zach Graumann about this topic and answer listener questions on the podcast this week. I started Noble Mobile to ease people’s costs, and we have a Spring promo that is absolutely bananas of 6 free months as a thank you to the people who have supported me! That would save the average family $1,000. Email matt@noblemobile.com if you want to switch or explore. Offline no-phones party returns to NYC on May 21st – see you there! Go outside and look up.