Article 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 over 4,000 employees awake all night.
The CEO, long known for his "geek情怀," announced that Block will lay off 40% of its workforce, reducing the total number of employees from over 10,000 to fewer than 6,000.
This should have been a public relations crisis, but something surreal happened: Block’s stock surged wildly after hours, climbing as much as 22%. The capital market bid farewell to these 4,000 employees with a cold, almost clinical round of applause.
Dorsey provided only a chilling reason in his letter:
The intelligent tools we are developing and using, combined with smaller, more flatly organized teams, are giving rise to an entirely new way of working that is fundamentally changing how companies are built and operated.
This new normal—where layoffs are seen as a positive sign—is becoming one of the most heartbreaking signals of our time. It tells us:
Before AI, capital no longer pays for "scale"—it狂欢s over ultimate "human efficiency."
Who “stole” your office chair?
Many people have tried to soften the excuse for these layoffs: it’s simply about addressing the “historical bill” of aggressive hiring during the pandemic.
Indeed, Block’s workforce tripled over three years. In 2019, Block had approximately 3,900 employees. During the three years of the pandemic, the company expanded rapidly alongside the broader tech industry, reaching 12,500 employees by the end of 2022.
But if you only see "inventory reduction," 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, business, and number of customers are all growing. This indicates that the company is not cutting jobs due to financial hardship, but because it is evolving.
Block’s involvement in mobile payments, lending, and cryptocurrencies once required large legal compliance and back-office teams. Today, LLMs (large language models) have made junior white-collar workers and programmers extremely cost-inefficient when it comes to tasks like contract review and code generation.
In the past, bosses thought: “There’s more work to do, so we need to hire more people.”
Now, the boss is thinking: "There's more work to do—we need to upgrade the AI plugin."
When employees shift from being the "engine" that creates value to becoming a "burden" on the financial statements, the underlying message is clear: the company no longer needs so many people.
Are we becoming the "useless class"?
Science fiction author Liu Cixin described an extreme future in "Supporting Humanity":
When productivity becomes powerful enough, most people no longer need to participate in production. They are supported and provided for, with no worries about food or shelter, yet they completely lose their sense of contribution to the system. They are neither workers nor creators—merely passive consumers.
This feeling has spread through the workplace today. When your work is reduced in a financial report to a footnote saying “efficiency improved by 40%,” that anxiety isn’t just about losing your job—it’s about asking: In this highly automated system, does my existence still matter?
The logic of capital is cold: in the AI era, the fewer people, the purer the company. This structural obsolescence is far more terrifying than temporary cyclical unemployment.
The window has been open; you just never looked up.
Pessimistic narratives are always easier to spread, but history never moves in just one direction.
The printing press "killed" scribes, yet sparked an explosion of knowledge during the Age of Exploration;
The assembly line killed the artisan but gave birth to the trillion-dollar modern industrial design;
The internet "killed" the mail carrier, but ushered in a golden age for independent developers and content creators.
Each technological wave closes one door while opening another, though that other door was never obviously noticeable at the time.
The question you should be staying up all night thinking about isn't "Will I be replaced by AI?"—it's: Where should I build my own "irreplaceability" in this tsunami?
AI Era Survival Checklist
The news of Block's layoffs will soon be overshadowed by tomorrow's new trending topic, but it sounds the death knell for old-school production and heralds the evolution of intelligent collaboration.
When standardized work is displaced by AI, the price of non-standardized, human-centered work requiring complex strategic reasoning will reach historic highs.
Here are three specific suggestions for everyone still running through the corporate jungle:
Break down the "AI content" of the task
Take a piece of paper and break down your work into fragments:
High AI content (danger zone): Identify tasks that are repetitive, procedural, or have standard answers. These are AI’s domain—automate them with AI as soon as possible to free up your time.
Low AI content (moat): Which aspects rely on complex利益博弈 and emotional connections? These are the foundation of your survival.
Master AI
The future won’t be about AI replacing people, but about people who use AI replacing those who don’t. Don’t see AI as your adversary—see it as your “power-up” and your “free intern.”
If you can use AI to accomplish what once required five people, you can transform from the "40% being optimized" into the "indispensable leader."
Become an "Architect"
AI is good at answering questions but not at asking the right ones.
AI excels at handling logic but struggles with the fragility of human nature.
Learn to become someone who can identify system blind spots, integrate resources, and build deep trust.
These soft skills are even more scarce in the age of AI.
Conclusion
Jack Dorsey didn't just send layoff notices—he issued a verdict on an era: the old myth of scale has fallen, and the new agent era has begun.
Looking back at history, every technological wave ultimately benefits not those who panicked first or those who blindly ignored it, but those who saw the direction clearly, adjusted in advance, and took real action.
A stock price surge is a狂欢 of capital, but it could also be the starting point for personal transformation.
Will you linger in sorrow amid the ruins, or rebuild yourself within a new logic?
Today’s interaction: What percentage of your current job could be replaced by AI? Would you proactively adopt AI to boost efficiency, or do you fear it might eventually “steal” your desk chair?
Share your workplace survival tips in the comments.