Jack Dorsey, founder of Block (the company behind Square and Cash App), fired half his workforce this week. He didn't explain it as a crisis cut. He explained it as the future: 'In the next year, most companies will reach the same conclusion.'
It's not an isolated case. In 2025 some 100,000 tech workers were laid off. In the first months of 2026, another 92,000. And while that happens: no government has launched a response. No major economy is seriously debating it.
Most will read this and reach the easy conclusion: 'Artificial intelligence is destroying jobs. We have to stop it or regulate it.'
It's the reading that soothes, because it has a culprit. And it's exactly the one that keeps you from seeing what's really happening.
This isn't about a technology that destroys jobs.
It's about something more uncomfortable: what happens when each individual decision is correct and the result of all of them together is a disaster no one chose.
1. None of those companies is doing anything wrong. Dorsey isn't a villain. If your competitors cut costs with tools that do the work of half a workforce, and you don't, in a year they sell cheaper and you disappear. The company that doesn't cut isn't more ethical: it's the one that goes bankrupt first. Each one follows its incentives perfectly. That's exactly the problem. There's no one to blame, and that's why there's nothing easy to ban.
2. The sum of rational decisions doesn't give a rational result. Each laid-off worker is another company's customer. When they all cut at once, they're all, at once, cutting their own buyers. Each shifts the cost of its efficiency onto a common ground —the economy, people with a salary— that they all depend on to sell. It's the equilibrium where every player optimizes and everyone loses. Each party's logic, multiplied and simultaneous, becomes suicidal for the whole.
3. That's why no government acts, and it's not from clumsiness. A problem like this has no natural owner. The market can't solve it, because the market is precisely the mechanism that produces it. And no country can solve it alone: whoever bans layoffs on their own will watch their companies move to where it isn't banned. The same dilemma companies have among themselves, governments have among themselves, one floor up. The structure repeats at every level, and that repetition is why nothing stops it: it's not that the will is missing, it's that a place to decide from is missing.
It's comfortable to look at this as a spectator, as if it were them: the big companies, the governments, the people at the top.
But if you're building something, however small, you're not outside the game. You're inside. The day will come when you can do with a tool what a person you pay —or were thinking of hiring— does today. And whoever does it will sell cheaper than you.
The question isn't whether AI takes jobs. It's this: when it's your turn to choose between the right decision for your business and the specific person left out, what will you do? And at what point does your rational choice become part of that thing no one chose?
When half of a company's workers disappear at once, it's not just a hole that opens. A chain of new needs opens, and almost none of them are technological:
There will be millions of people with experience and no place. Most 'reskilling' programs are smoke. Whoever can take someone from a trade that disappeared to one that exists —really, with results— has work for a decade.
Many of the laid-off don't return to a payroll: they become self-employed, freelance or founders out of necessity, without having chosen it. They need what the company used to give them: structure, clients, a system not to drown. Building that is a layer with immediate demand.
When everything automatable is automated and made cheap, the scarce becomes the opposite: the in-person, the local, what's valuable precisely because there's a person behind it. There lies value the wave doesn't carry off.
The biggest opportunity isn't to ride the cut. It's to be a coordination mechanism where there is none: the place, the service or the network that helps a group do together what each one separately does badly. Where coordination is missing, building it is the business.
A world with a villain is less frightening than one with none. A villain can be stopped. A lot of sensible people each making, individually, the right decision, cannot. The result we build among us all and none of us chose. The question is no longer who to blame. It's who decides when no one is at the wheel and we're all inside the car.