Author: PANews
On February 26, the night in Silicon Valley was unusually cold. Jack Dorsey, founder of Block (formerly Square) and co-founder of Twitter, sent a letter that kept over 4,000 employees awake all night.
The CEO, known for his "geek spirit," announced: Block will lay off 40% of its workforce, reducing the total number of employees from over 10,000 to less than 6,000.
This should have been a public relations crisis, but something magical happened: Block's stock price surged wildly in after-hours trading, at one point soaring 22%. The capital market sent off these 4,000 employees with a near-murderous applause.
In the letter, Dorsey provided a chilling reason:
“The intelligent tools we are developing and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are fostering a fundamentally new way of working that is changing the paradigm of building and operating companies.”
This new normal of “layoffs as good news” is becoming the most heart-wrenching signal of our times. It tells us:
In the face of AI, capital no longer pays for “scale,” only for extreme “human efficiency.”
Who "stole" your office chair?
Many people try to find a gentle excuse for this layoff: it’s just digesting the "historical bill" of a crazy hiring spree during the pandemic.
Indeed, the number of Block employees tripled in three years. In 2019, Block had about 3,900 employees. During the three years of the pandemic, the company expanded crazily alongside the entire tech industry, and by the end of 2022, the number of employees rose to 12,500.
But if you only see “inventory reduction,” that would be too naive.
This layoff is essentially a complete rewriting of production logic.
The latest financial report shows that Block’s gross profit is rising, business is increasing, and the number of clients is also growing. This indicates that the company is not laying off employees because it is “poor,” but because it has “changed.”
The mobile payment, lending, and cryptocurrency sectors that Block operates in once required large legal compliance and back-office teams. Now, LLMs (large language models) have made the cost-effectiveness of junior white-collar workers and programmers extremely low in handling contract reviews and code generation.
In the past, bosses thought: “More work means we need to hire people.”
Now, bosses think: “More work means we need to upgrade AI plugins.”
When employees in the financial reports shift from being the “engines” that create value to liabilities that drag down the statements, the underlying message is clear: the company no longer needs this many people.
Are we becoming the "useless class"?
Science fiction writer Liu Cixin described in "The Wandering Earth" an extreme future:
When productivity is powerful enough, most people will no longer need to participate in production. They are provided for, with no worries about food and clothing, yet they have completely lost their sense of contribution to the system. They are neither laborers nor creators, merely passive consumers existing in the system.
This feeling has already spread in the workplace today. When your job is reduced to a footnote of “efficiency improvement of 40%” in financial reports, the anxiety is not just about unemployment, but rather: in this highly automated system, does my existence still have meaning?
The logic of capital is ruthless: in the AI era, the fewer people there are, the purer the company becomes. This structural obsolescence is far more frightening than temporary cyclical unemployment.
The window has always been open; it’s just that you haven’t looked up
Pessimistic narratives are always easier to spread, but history never travels in a single direction.
The printing press "killed" scribes but opened the age of exploration and knowledge explosion;
The assembly line "killed" craftsmen but incubated trillion-dollar modern industrial design;
The internet "killed" postmen but ushered in a golden age for independent developers and content creators.
Every wave of technology closes one door while opening another window, even if that window was never particularly noticeable at the time.
The real question worth pondering all night is no longer “Will I be replaced by AI?” but rather: In this tsunami, where should I establish my "irreplaceability"?
The life-saving checklist for the AI era
The news of Block’s layoffs will soon be overshadowed by tomorrow's trending hot searches, but it tolls the death knell for old production and sounds the horn for the evolution of intelligent collaboration.
As standardized jobs are swept away by AI, non-standardized, warm, and complex jobs that require strategic engagement will see historic high prices.
Here are three specific suggestions for every person still running in the workplace jungle:
Dissect the “AI content” of your job
Take out a piece of paper and break your job into fragments:
High AI content (danger zone): Which tasks are repetitive, procedural, and have standard answers. These are the territories of AI; please automate them as soon as possible to free up your time.
Low AI content (moat): Which tasks rely on complex interest negotiation and emotional connections. These are the foundation of your survival.
Become proficient in AI
The future is not about AI replacing humans but about people who use AI replacing those who don’t. Don’t view AI as your hypothetical enemy; view it as your “plug-in” and “free intern.”
If you can accomplish what used to take five people to complete with just AI, you can shift from being among the “40% to be optimized” to being “an indispensable leader.”
Become an “architect”
AI excels at answering questions but is not good at asking the right ones.
AI is proficient in handling logic but struggles with fragile human emotions.
Learn to become someone who can see the blind spots of the system, integrate resources, and build deep trust.
These soft skills are becoming increasingly rare in the AI era.
Conclusion
Jack Dorsey sent out not just a layoff letter but a judgment for the era: the old myth of scale has collapsed, and a new era of intelligent entities has arrived.
Looking back in history, every wave of technology has ultimately benefited not those who panicked early or those who blindly ignored it, but those who recognized the direction, adjusted ahead of time, and took real action.
The surge in stock prices is a celebration of capital, but it may also be the starting point for personal reshaping.
Will you choose to mourn among the ruins or reconstruct yourself with the new logic?
Today's interaction: In your current position, what proportion of your work can be replaced by AI? Will you proactively introduce AI to improve efficiency, or are you worried that it will eventually “steal” your office chair?
Feel free to discuss your workplace "survival rules" in the comments.
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