AI
AI gave corporate America a way to gut headcount and get applauded for it. An NBER study found only 2% of execs attributed cuts to actual AI, but 60% cut in anticipation of efficiencies that haven't arrived. The bet was never productivity. It was permanent wage compression with better PR.
tech
OpenAI built its brand on responsible governance. The internal record says otherwise. A web of 400 portfolio companies, a venture fund Sam owned without the board's knowledge, and a pattern of deals that keep landing in his favor.
social
Women are 25% of the tech workforce but took 45-47% of layoffs. Now AI-usage scores are becoming a retention criterion, and a Harvard meta-analysis of 143,000 people found women have 22% lower odds of using generative AI, not from lack of interest but lack of encouragement. Same group, twice.
tech
Klarna replaced 700 agents with a chatbot, became the poster child for AI productivity, then quietly hired humans back after quality collapsed and the CEO admitted they'd "gone too far." The pattern is repeating across the industry while the actual productivity data remains vanishingly thin.
tech
Generative AI predicts the most statistically likely output from its training data, which means everything it creates pulls toward the middle of what already exists. If the technology had existed in the age of the horse and cart, it would have given you a better cart, never a car.