AI Will Transform the Economy, but the Safety Net Isn't Ready

In February 2026, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of payments company Block (formerly Square), announced that Block would cut roughly 4,000 employees, taking the company from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. "A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better," he wrote to shareholders. Block's stock surged as much as 25% in after-hours trading. Days later, the company published an essay called "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," laying out what this looks like in practice: the traditional corporate hierarchy, where managers route information between workers and executives, is being replaced by AI systems that handle the routing instead, producing what Block calls "a company built as an intelligence."

Three months before that, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff confirmed cutting 4,000 customer support positions, taking support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000. His explanation was blunt: "I need less heads." Only weeks earlier, he told Fortune that "AI augments people, but I don't know if it necessarily replaces them."

These are not fringe companies making speculative bets; Block processes millions of transactions daily through Square and Cash App, and Salesforce runs customer infrastructure for much of the Fortune 500. When their CEOs say AI is replacing human work at scale, they are describing what is already happening inside their own buildings.

I didn't need Block to tell me this because I already knew. My day job is in AI automation — clients hire me to find processes that can be automated and build those automations. In other words, I am one of the people replacing human work with machine work.

That makes it sound worse than it is. I don't find people and get them fired. In fact, so far, the people I've done automations for have been nothing but pleased. Yesterday, I did a consultation with a woman whose job involves copying information out of a portal into Excel, then back into the portal, then back into Excel, then back into the same portal. "A computer can do all of that," I told her, and her shoulders dropped in relief.¹

This is the pattern I see over and over: whole jobs don't disappear overnight. Instead, they erode. Data entry gets automated, then data reconciliation, then report generation, then the routine correspondence. People who pick up new skills grow into the parts of their work a computer can't handle; people who don't will surely find one day their remaining tasks have been distributed to their now-more-available coworkers and their position has been eliminated. Block has almost certainly been doing this kind of incremental automation for years, and "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" is merely describing what it all adds up to.

There's a lot of tech-first people who are full steam ahead on AI, and there's a lot of fearmongering from data scientists and people whose jobs are on the line, but it's important to remember technology has historically been a good thing. Technology cured smallpox and the Green Revolution kept billions from starving; global extreme poverty has fallen from about 36% of the world's population in 1990 to roughly 10% today.

AI is poised to have similar world-changing effects. A randomized trial in Sweden found that AI-supported mammography screening caught 20% more breast cancers than two radiologists reading the same scans, without increasing false positives. DeepMind's AlphaFold has mapped the 3D structure of over 200 million proteins and made the entire database free to researchers in 190 countries. That work won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and is already accelerating drug development for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer, with over 170 AI-discovered drug candidates now in clinical trials. A Harvard study found students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much physics, in less time, as students in the university's own active-learning classrooms. These aren't benefits that accrue to tech CEOs; they'll reach cancer patients, students without access to private tutoring, and people waiting on treatments the traditional pharmaceutical pipeline has been too slow to deliver.

There will likely be a few decades of pain first. The Industrial Revolution produced enormous gains for humanity, but the first generation of factory workers endured child labor, sixteen-hour days, and urban poverty that was arguably worse than what they'd left behind in the countryside. It took decades of labor organizing and political reform before those gains reached the people doing the work. The same thing happened with globalization; manufacturing towns across the American Midwest were hollowed out starting in the 1980s, and many of them still haven't recovered. Technology being good in the long run and technology being painful in the short run are not contradictions. They're the same story, and the question every time is how much of that pain was actually necessary.

Even if you think it won't be a good thing this time, resisting new technology has never preserved the past for anyone who tried it. The Luddites smashed textile machinery in 1811; the British government sent 12,000 troops to stop them, and the looms stayed. Longshoremen struck for 130 days in 1971 to stop containerized shipping; the containers stayed. New York taxi medallion holders watched their medallions fall from over $1 million in 2014 to as little as $80,000 after ride-hailing apps entered the market. The technology always stays, and the only question that has ever mattered is what happens to the people it displaces.

The Hustle Economy Is Not the Solution (as if anyone thought it was)

The American middle class has been shrinking for fifty years; in 1971, 61% of adults lived in middle-income households, and by 2021, that had fallen to 50%. Between 1979 and 2024, productivity rose nearly 81% while hourly pay grew only 29%. The middle class was already hobbling before AI entered the picture.

Into this environment, the internet's advice industry has produced things like HubSpot's "200+ Ways to Make Money with AI." The pitch is that if your job gets automated, you can hustle your way into a new one. AI makes it easier than ever to start a side business.

It's true that AI makes it easier than ever to start a side business, but it misses something basic: the gig economy depends on customers with disposable income, disposable income depends on stable employment, and stable employment isn't growing. As traditional jobs continue to shrink, fewer people will have money to spend on freelance services and digital products. The hustle economy is downstream of the employment economy, and the employment economy is the thing that's changing.

Over 70 million Americans already work in the gig economy, and only 40% of them have health insurance, compared to 82% of traditional employees.² They don't qualify for minimum wage protections, employer-sponsored retirement, or collective bargaining. The gig economy is not a safety net; it's the glaring absence of one.

What Needs to Happen

The American system placed the burden of healthcare, retirement, and economic security on employers. Lose your job, and you lose your health insurance, your retirement contributions, your disability coverage. These policies made a certain kind of sense when most people spent decades at the same company, but it makes much less sense in a world where a CEO can cut 40% of his workforce in a quarter and watch the stock price jump.

It's time for the government to stop passing the buck on the responsibility of caring for its citizens. AI didn't create this problem, but it is making it impossible to keep ignoring.

The public already agrees. Support for universal basic income has roughly doubled in the past decade: in 2017, a Gallup poll found 48% of Americans supported UBI for workers displaced by technology, and by 2020, that number had risen to 55% of registered voters. Support for universal healthcare is similarly strong: a 2025 Data for Progress poll found 65% of likely voters support Medicare for All, including 49% of Republicans, and Gallup's tracking of whether healthcare is the government's responsibility hit 62% in 2024, the highest in over a decade.

This shift is not accidental. A study published in Basic Income Studies found that awareness of automation leads to automation anxiety, which in turn drives support for UBI, and that this effect is strongest among lower-income and less-educated Americans. A 2025 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 71% of Americans are worried AI will permanently displace workers. The economic pressure from automation is building the political will for the programs that would cushion its impact, and these are not fringe ideas; they are already majority positions.

As someone working in AI transformation, the tech billionaires clearly want me to be on their side in this debate. But there is an ocean between me and a tech CEO, and I have more in common with my partner who is an educator than with anyone making decisions at Block or Salesforce or OpenAI. The billionaires building AI are executing a vision that will reshape the economy, for good and for ill, but it is not being executed for your benefit or mine, but theirs and theirs alone.

I don't think the answer is to fight the technology. The work being automated is work no one wants, and the longer arc of technological progress includes some of the greatest things our species has ever done. But we cannot sit around waiting for the people in power or the systems currently in place to take care of us, because they won't. The technology is coming regardless, and the question is whether we build the political systems to match it.

1. Healthcare that isn't tied to your employer,
2. Income support that keeps people afloat during transitions,
3. Education that keeps pace with how fast the economy is moving. The longer we wait to build them, the more painful the transition will be.

If you're not sure where to start, build a financial cushion, pay attention to how your industry is changing, and learn what you can. But look past your own household, too. Support the candidates and organizations pushing for universal healthcare, UBI, and labor protections designed for the economy being built around us.

The billionaires have their plan. It would be good if the rest of us had one too.