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Are CEOs Lying About AI?
Mark Zuckerberg called it a budget trade-off. Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 jobs. Salesforce slashed its support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000. ServiceNow's CEO celebrated agents that don't need lunch or healthcare. The story these CEOs are telling is that AI made the cuts necessary. But the productivity numbers don't show it — and the pattern of how new technology actually gets adopted suggests we've been here before.
In this episode, Josh argues that CEOs aren't lying about where AI is going. They're lying about where it is right now. Drawing on research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the San Francisco Fed, and a pattern that goes back to electric motors in the 1880s, he makes the case that every general purpose technology produces a dip before it produces a gain. The companies cutting the deepest aren't building toward an upswing — they're funding data centers, telling a story to Wall Street, and quietly eliminating the institutional knowledge, domain expertise, and human judgment that would have gotten them through the dip in the first place. The J-curve doesn't care about earnings calls. And the people who would have led the transformation won't be there when the curve finally turns up.
You can't cut your way to the future.
About The Job Market Sh*t Show
The Job Market Sh*t Show: How AI Broke Hiring and What Might Be Next is an investigation into how hiring actually works now, how AI and automation have upended the process, and why the old rules no longer apply. It blends reporting, analysis, and firsthand stories from inside a labor market that’s increasingly algorithmic, opaque, and indifferent to the people moving through it—while asking what, if anything, might replace a system that no longer seems to work for humans on either side of the process.
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By Josh LevineMark Zuckerberg called it a budget trade-off. Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 jobs. Salesforce slashed its support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000. ServiceNow's CEO celebrated agents that don't need lunch or healthcare. The story these CEOs are telling is that AI made the cuts necessary. But the productivity numbers don't show it — and the pattern of how new technology actually gets adopted suggests we've been here before.
In this episode, Josh argues that CEOs aren't lying about where AI is going. They're lying about where it is right now. Drawing on research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the San Francisco Fed, and a pattern that goes back to electric motors in the 1880s, he makes the case that every general purpose technology produces a dip before it produces a gain. The companies cutting the deepest aren't building toward an upswing — they're funding data centers, telling a story to Wall Street, and quietly eliminating the institutional knowledge, domain expertise, and human judgment that would have gotten them through the dip in the first place. The J-curve doesn't care about earnings calls. And the people who would have led the transformation won't be there when the curve finally turns up.
You can't cut your way to the future.
About The Job Market Sh*t Show
The Job Market Sh*t Show: How AI Broke Hiring and What Might Be Next is an investigation into how hiring actually works now, how AI and automation have upended the process, and why the old rules no longer apply. It blends reporting, analysis, and firsthand stories from inside a labor market that’s increasingly algorithmic, opaque, and indifferent to the people moving through it—while asking what, if anything, might replace a system that no longer seems to work for humans on either side of the process.