Returning to a measure we introduced in 2023, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out the type of workers that are often believed to be vulnerable to ai. These are white-collar employees, describing people in back-office support, financial operations, sales and much more besides. There is a similar pattern here: we find no evidence of an ai hit (see chart 2). Quite the opposite, in fact. In the past year the share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly.

Microsoft is not talking about replacing developers. It says GitHub Copilot – and the latest version of the product called “Coding agent” – are tools to partner with developers, akin to a peer programmer.

Seeing as how many of the autonomous bots have failed for me personally, I definately appreciate a pragmatic approach to AI coding detailed here.

_{Quote Citation: GERGELY OROSZ, “Microsoft is dogfooding AI dev tools’ future”, MAY 27, 2025, https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/microsoft-ai-dev-tools}

Called J.P. Morgan Private Client, it is anchored by the new physical locations, of which there will be 31 by the end of next year. The service comes with its own mobile banking app, but its main appeal is the in-person experience: Instead of being handed off to multiple employees like at a Chase branch, J.P. Morgan Private Client members are assigned to a single banker.

I think this is the ultimate outcome of services in an economy of bots. A dedicated human touch. we are human after all, I think.

My exact words to a small group of our finance, legal and talent colleagues last week: ‘You are committing career suicide if you’re not aggressively experimenting with AI.’

The reality is, we don’t know today how much AI will do in the future. But lots of companies are betting on a lot. Even if AI doesn’t take your job, someone who is using AI will. Is the mantra I hear most repeated.

From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating. When BYTE magazine came out with its premier issue in 1975, the cover called computers “the world’s greatest toy.” When Bill Gates wrote about the value of good software in the spring of 1976, he framed his argument in terms of making the computer interesting, not useful: “…software makes the difference between a computer being a fascinating educational tool for years and being an exciting enigma for a few months and then gathering dust in the closet.”

And then, almost overnight, business leaders see the savings of replacing humans with AI — and do this en masse. They stop opening up new jobs, stop backfilling existing ones, and then replace human workers with agents or related automated alternatives.

Be it automation, off shoring, or just plain ‘do more with less’ AI is accelerating automation of many tasks. I know the long view is that technology results in more jobs. But when will they come?

The New York Times got in touch with Perrone this week, who explained that he liked Game of Thrones, that he bought the dragon image online, and that he selected it because ‘people like dragons.’ He plans to keep using the logo but will tone it down in future filings.

Next time, better call Saul. Too humerous to not take note.

_{Quote Citation: NATE ANDERSON, “Don’t watermark your legal PDFs with purple dragons in suits”, MAY 1, 2025 3:41 PM, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/dont-watermark-your-legal-pdfs-with-purple-dragons-in-suits/}

During a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20% to 30% of code inside the company’s repositories was “written by software” — meaning AI.

I wish business had learned their lesson when once upon a time they tried to measure output by lines of code (LOC). Now we have this made up metric of ‘accepted’ suggestions. There’s lots of better ways to measure effectiveness, how fast the printer goes isn’t one of them.

Collapse does not mean you’re personally dying right now. It means y’all are dying right now. Death is sometimes close, sometimes far away, but always there. I used to judge those herds of gazelle when the lion eats one of them alive and everyone keeps going — but no, humans are just the same. That’s the real meaning of herd immunity. We’re fundamentally immune to giving a shit.

From someone who watched the collapse of Sri Lanka, ominous words of advice for Americans. Sometimes its really bizzare to read the news and head off on my day, but that’s just it. Get busy living, or start dying.

Corporate profits have been elevated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of the last quarter of 2024, they were $4 trillion—2.3 percentage points higher as a fraction of national income than they were prior to the pandemic. The increase was entirely driven by domestic nonfinancial industries. Notably, retail and wholesale trade, construction, manufacturing and health care experienced a marked increase in profitability. Higher corporate profits mostly went to rewarding shareholders via higher dividends.