Jobs

“If you’re, like, farming, you’re doing something people really need,” Altman explained. “You’re making them food, you’re keeping them alive. This is real work.” But the farmer would see our modern jobs as “playing a game to fill your time,” and therefore not a “real job.”

“It’s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,” Altman said, we’d think “maybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer’s job, but it’s a lot more real than this game you’re playing to entertain yourself.”

As my friend Kasey put it in a recent conversation, growth is a fire. If you build a nice, sustainable fire, it’ll keep you warm, cook food and sustain life. And if the only thing you care about is how big your fire is, then it’ll set fire to everything around it, and the more you throw into it, the more it’ll burn. Eventually, you’ll have nothing left, but if you desperately desire that fire, you will constantly have to find new things to burn at any cost.

The careful, coded corporate language executives once used in describing staff cuts is giving way to blunt boasts about ever-shrinking workforces. Gone are the days when trimming head count signaled retrenchment or trouble. Bosses are showing off to Wall Street that they are embracing artificial intelligence and serious about becoming lean. After all, it is no easy feat to cut head count for 20 consecutive quarters, an accomplishment Wells Fargo’s chief executive officer touted this month. The bank is using attrition “as our friend,” Charlie Scharf said on the bank’s quarterly earnings call as he told investors that its head count had fallen every quarter over the past five years—by a total of 23% over the period.

These patterns are particularly striking in technology sectors, where workers might expect AI to augment rather than to replace their roles. Software developers, data analysts and other tech professionals are finding that AI tools can indeed accelerate certain tasks, but potentially at the cost of overall employment demand.

Our results suggest we may be witnessing the early stages of AI-driven job displacement. Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily affected manufacturing or routine clerical work, generative AI can target cognitive tasks performed by knowledge workers—traditionally among the most secure employment categories.

This 1.34 percentage point increase represents more than just a statistical noise; it reflects a significant shift in how the economy is absorbing newly educated workers. The magnitude of this change becomes even more striking when compared with that of other demographic groups. Noncollege-educated workers in the same age range have seen only a modest 0.47 percentage point increase in unemployment, while older college graduates have experienced a 0.38 percentage point rise.

Jason Leverant, the COO and president of AtWork Group, told Newsweek that automation tended to hit jobs that fell into what he called the “Three D’s”: dull, dirty or dangerous. Many white-collar positions in the “dull” category are already being replaced by AI tools.

Feels like this is an assertion without citation.. but it has been a rough few years.

_{Quote Citation: Newsweek, “US Hits Highest Layoffs Since COVID - Newsweek”, 2025-08-12, https://www.newsweek.com/us-hits-highest-layoffs-since-covid-2111794}

Altman illustrated the productivity revolution with a personal example. He described using an upcoming OpenAI model to complete a complex home automation programming task that would have taken him “days to do” before AI assistance.

The AI completed “almost all of the work” in just “5 minutes,” he said. A year ago, “you would have paid a very high-end programmer 20 hours, 40 hours something like that to do” the same task. With AI, it cost “probably less than a dollar’s worth of compute tokens.”

For example, customer service tasks in call centers and through online chat functions will become more AI dependent soon and other tasks not, McMillon said.

Take humanoid robot workers. Companies have recently pitched robot workers to Walmart, McMillon said on stage. Yet “until we’re serving humanoid robots and they have the ability to spend money, we’re serving people,” he said. “We are going to put people in front of people.” 

The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave

Article indicates that average age of tech companies has risen by ~5 years and also that % of workforce under 25 has shrank. will see how things shake out. I have to admit I wonder how much of the “we don’t need ‘old’ people” crowd has changed their tune since they are now the old people (in tech).