The cruelest truth of the AI ​​era is hidden in Block's layoff letter.

Written by: 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 more than 4,000 employees up all night.

The CEO, known for his "geek spirit," announced that Block will lay off 40% of its staff, 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, soaring by as much as 22%. The capital market gave a cold-blooded applause as it bid farewell to the 4,000 employees.

Dorsey gave only one chilling reason in the letter:

"The intelligent tools we are developing and using, combined with smaller, flatter teams, are giving rise to a completely new way of working, fundamentally changing the way companies are built and operated."

This new normal of "layoffs being a boon" is becoming the most disheartening signal of our time. It tells us:

In the face of AI, capital no longer pays for "scale," but only for the ultimate "human efficiency."

Who "stole" your office chair?

Many people are trying to find a mild excuse for this layoff: it's just digesting the "historical bill" of the massive hiring spree during the pandemic.

Indeed, Block's headcount tripled in three years. In 2019, Block had approximately 3,900 employees. During the three years of the pandemic, the company expanded rapidly along with the entire tech industry, reaching 12,500 employees by the end of 2022.

But if you only see "clearing inventory", you're being naive.

The essence of this layoff is a complete rewriting of the production logic.

The latest financial report shows that Block's gross profit is increasing, its business is growing, and its customer base is expanding. This indicates that the company is not laying off employees because it is "poor," but because it has "changed."

Blockchain, involving mobile payments, lending, and cryptocurrencies, once required large legal compliance and back-office teams. Now, LLM (Large Language Model) makes contract review and code generation extremely inefficient for junior white-collar workers and programmers.

In the past, bosses would think, "If there's too much work, we need to hire more people."

Now, the boss is thinking: "With more work, we need to upgrade the AI ​​plugin."

When employees go from being the "engine" of value creation to a "burden" dragging down the financial statements, the underlying message is simple: the company no longer needs so many people.

Are we becoming a "useless class"?

In his novel *The Support of Humanity*, science fiction writer Liu Cixin described an extreme future:

When productivity is strong enough, most people no longer need to participate in production. They are supported and have no worries about food and clothing, but they have completely lost their sense of contribution to the system. They are not laborers, not creators, but merely passive consumers.

This feeling is spreading in the workplace today. When your work is reduced to a footnote in the financial report: "efficiency improved by 40%", the anxiety isn't just about losing your job, but rather: in this highly automated system, does my existence still have any meaning?

The logic of capital is ruthless: in the AI ​​era, the fewer people involved, the purer the company. This structural disuse is far more terrifying than temporary cyclical unemployment.

The window was open the whole time, you just didn't look up.

Pessimistic narratives are always easier to spread, but history never travels a one-way street.

The printing press "killed" the scribes, but it also ushered in the knowledge explosion of the Age of Exploration;

Assembly lines "killed" artisans, but incubated a trillion-dollar modern industrial design industry.

The internet "killed" mail carriers, but ushered in a golden age for independent developers and content creators.

Every technological wave closes one door while opening another window, even if that window is never particularly noticeable at the time.

The real question that's worth staying up all night to think about is no longer "Will I be replaced by AI?", but rather: In this tsunami, where should I establish my "indispensability"?

Lifesaving list for the AI ​​era

The news of Block's layoffs will soon be overshadowed by tomorrow's trending topics, but it has tolled the death knell for old production methods and sounded the clarion call for the evolution of intelligent collaboration.

As standardized jobs are taken over by AI, non-standardized jobs, those with human touch and complex game theory capabilities, will see their prices reach historic highs.

Here are three specific suggestions for everyone still navigating the jungle of the workplace:

The "AI content" in the dismantling work

Take out a piece of paper and break your work down into pieces:

• High AI Content (Danger Zone) : These are repetitive, procedural tasks with standard answers. These are AI's domain; automate them as soon as possible to free up your time.

• Low AI content (moat) : Which companies rely on complex power struggles and emotional connections? These are the foundation of your survival.

Proficient in using AI

The future will not be about AI replacing humans, but about those who know how to use AI replacing those who don't. Don't treat AI as your imaginary enemy; treat it as your "cheat code" and "free intern."

If you can use AI to do what used to take five people, you can go from being part of the "optimized 40%" to becoming an "indispensable leader".

Becoming an "Architect"

AI is good at answering questions, but not good at asking the right questions.

AI excels at handling logic, but it's not good at dealing with the vulnerabilities of human nature.

Learn to be someone who can see the blind spots in a system, integrate resources, and build deep trust.

These soft skills are becoming increasingly scarce in the age of AI.

Conclusion

Jack Dorsey's letter was not just a layoff notice, but a verdict of the times: the old myth of scale has collapsed, and the new era of intelligent agents has arrived.

Looking back at history, the ultimate beneficiaries of every technological wave have never been those who panicked the earliest, nor those who blindly ignored it, but rather those who saw the direction clearly, made adjustments in advance, and truly took action .

A soaring stock price is a celebration for capital, but it can also be the starting point for personal reinvention.

Is it better to wallow in sorrow amidst the ruins, or to reconstruct oneself within a new logic?

Today's question: What percentage of your current job could be replaced by AI? Would you proactively introduce AI to improve efficiency, or are you worried that it will eventually "steal" your office chair?

Feel free to share your workplace "survival rules" in the comments section.