Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 people and called it an AI strategy. But when AI creates time, the interesting question isn't whether to cut—it's what you choose to do with the time you've freed. Dorsey chose to give it away.
Helen's new chapter maps the territory that isn't talked about enough: the emotional and cognitive path people experience with AI.
She identifies five places people find themselves: The Wake-Up (that first moment of surprise), The Groove (where it becomes infrastructure), The Merge (where boundaries blur), The Breaking (where something gives way), and The Rebuild (where you construct new frameworks). What makes this different from a typical stage model is that nobody moves through it cleanly. You loop back. You occupy multiple states at once. You can be in the Groove at work and deep in the Merge on a creative project without realizing it.
The chapter ends with something quite useful: a practical guide to recognizing where you are, where the people around you might be, and how to actually have conversations about it without shutting people down.
We're thrilled to announce more speakers for the Artificiality Summit 2026! Don't forget that Early pricing ends on March 31—jump in before the price goes up! More info & tickets here.
Jamer Hunt collaboratively designs open and adaptable frameworks for participation that respond to emergent cultural conditions—in education, organizations, exhibitions, and for the public. He is the Vice Provost for Transdisciplinary Initiatives at The New School (2016-present), where he was founding director of the graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design (2009-2015). He is the author of Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible (Grand Central Publishing, March 2020), a book that repositions scale as a practice-based framework for analyzing broken systems and navigating complexity. He has published over twenty articles on the poetics and politics of design, including for Fast Company and the Huffington Post, and he is co-author, with Meredith Davis, of Visual Communication Design(Bloomsbury, 2017).
As a Designer, Josh Lovejoy's approach is to address the heart of people’s needs, whether that’s through product development, fundamental research, or organizational practices. He is motivated by a restless curiosity about how our actions as individuals might better align with our values, especially those values that too-often "go without saying”. Josh currently works at Amazon Prime Video, where he focuses on the UX of AI for personalization systems. Previously, he was Head of Design for Microsoft’s Ethics & Society team, led UX for Google’s People + AI Research initiative, architected Amazon’s first unified design system for online shopping, and co-founded an eSports media startup called Giant Realm.
Julia (Arnott‑Neenee) Pahina is an award‑winning social entrepreneur and systems change strategist transforming the technology sector through digital equity, closing the AI divide and cultivating new systems that shape our shared future. As Co‑Founder and CEO of Fibre Fale, a Pacific‑led EdTech social enterprise, she has engaged over 19,000 people, delivered 70+ programmes, and reached over 5 million online — driving intergenerational digital and AI literacy across the region. Julia also co‑leads WOLFE Intelligence Studio, advising organisations on human-centered innovation and future of work. Her board and advisory roles include the Digital Council for Aotearoa NZ, Human Rights Commission NZ, the World Economic Forum, and the AI Forum NZ. Julia’s work sits where technology meets humanity - ensuring the future of AI advances justice, dignity, and collective agency.
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her pioneering writings on social trends. Her acclaimed books include Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure (2023), which was nominated for a National Book Award and named an Amazon Top New Release. Her renowned book Distracted: Reclaiming our Focus in a World of Lost Attention (2nd Ed., 2018) sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of fragmenting our attention. Named to multiple “Best Books of 2023” lists, Uncertain explores why we should seek not-knowing in this era of angst and flux. Far from miring us in inertia, our uncertainty fuels curiosity, resilience, adaptability and creativity – the cognitive skills we need in a time of angst and flux. Winner of the 2020 Dorothy Lee Book Award for excellence in technology criticism, Distracted investigates the fate of attention in an era marked by fragmentation, speed, and hyper-connectivity.
Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 people at Block last week and called it an AI strategy. I don't buy it.
The numbers don't add up. No other tech leader is claiming 40%+ productivity replacement from AI. Block's growth has been slowing for years. And the company's forward guidance shows no new growth—just predictable margin improvement from cutting headcount. This looks like a straightforward profit extraction move dressed up in AI language. (It also wouldn't be the first time Jack has been accused of hiring too many people.)
But the specifics at Block aren't what concern me most. It's what Jack projected outward—that the majority of companies would reach the same conclusion within a year and make similar structural changes. If that happens, we have a composition problem. The efficiency play works in isolation. It's potentially catastrophic if everyone does it simultaneously. Laid-off workers stop spending. Smaller companies stop investing. The contraction cascades.
Here's the fork that most AI-and-jobs commentary is missing: when AI creates productivity gains, leaders face a choice. You can use AI to shrink—cut people, extract profit, hand the savings to shareholders. Or you can use AI to expand—redeploy the surplus toward new growth that wasn't economically viable before. What AI actually creates, when it works, is time. Jack had 8 million person-hours liberated and chose to give them away.
This connects directly to the cognitive whitespace work we've been developing. When AI frees up human capacity, the strategic question isn't whether to cut—it's what you choose to do with the time you've freed. We can't help wondering what those 4,000 people might have built.
I've always liked Demis Hassabis best among the AI leaders. He's a scientist first. He cares about expanding what humans can know. In a field full of people chasing money and power, that matters. Hassabis turned down a seven-figure gaming offer before he was eighteen because he wanted to study science. He drives a ten-year-old car. He doesn't collect houses. His dedication to discovery is legit.
But I didn't expect Sebastian Mallaby's book to also make me more cautious of him, I am still trying to figure out exactly why.
Mallaby—who wrote The Power Law, one of the best books on Silicon Valley—had over thirty hours of direct conversation with Hassabis and hundreds of interviews with allies, detractors, and rivals including Mustafa Suleyman and Ilya Sutskever. All of them come through as themselves. And what comes through with Hassabis is a mercenary quality to his charisma that the book never quite names but doesn't hide either. He deals with the Valley and takes its money while lambasting its leaders. He asks what money will even mean once productivity takes off. He believes he can control the most powerful technology ever built.
These come across as contradictions in a very deep person. People who are completely certain they're pursuing the ultimate good tend to treat friction as something to overcome. Hassabis knows the Oppenheimer parallel applies to him. He proceeds anyway. I find that combination of self-awareness and full commitment more unsettling than if he was just blindly ambitious.
I walked away from this book feeling like I know these people. In a field full of hagiography and hit pieces, that's a nice change. Essential reading for anyone trying to understand who is actually steering AI and what drives them.
Don't miss the Artificiality Summit 2026!
October 22-24, 2026 in Bend, Oregon
Our theme will be Unknowing. Why? For centuries, humans believed we were the only species with reason, agency, self-improvement. Then came AI. We are no longer the only system that learns, adapts, or acts with agency. And when the boundary of intelligence moves, the boundary of humanity moves with it.
Something is happening to our thinking, our being, our becoming. If AI changes how we think, and how we think shapes who we become, then how might AI change what it means to be human?
Unknowing is how we stay conscious and make space for emergence.
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Dave Edwards is a Co-Founder of Artificiality. He previously co-founded Intelligentsia.ai (acquired by Atlantic Media) and worked at Apple, CRV, Macromedia, Morgan Stanley, Quartz, and ThinkEquity.
