Tooled

“Of course, the last few months have seen hundreds of thousands of tech workers lose their jobs. Frankly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the tech industry conducted sweeping, wide-scale layoffs just as they began investing heavily in AI-driven automation. I’m still haunted by the fact that Microsoft announced a $10 billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT and DALL-E — and they made that announcement not five days after laying off 10,000 workers. It’s hard not to read that as a signal about the future of work in our industry. About whose work — and whose skill — gets to matter.”

I've been seeing a lot of people talking about AI lately, it's hard to avoid it when it feels like the hot topic of the moment. But recently more thoughtful pieces about what this means and how it affects us and how damaging it could be—both in taking away jobs but also in steering us onto wrong paths—and this is definintely one of them. What's been going on with tech layoffs, just as workers were feeling empowered isn't coincidental.