There are moments when the future arrives not as a prophecy, nor as a cinematic catastrophe, but as an executive classification scheme. Builders build. Sellers sell. Measurers measure. The formula is neat, memorable and slightly terrifying, which is often how history chooses to introduce a new social order. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, recently explained why his company had laid off more than a fifth of its workforce despite strong growth and healthy revenues. It was not, he argued, because Cloudflare was failing. It was because artificial intelligence had changed the shape of the company itself. Some people were still needed to create products. Some were still needed to sell them. But the large category of people who measured, coordinated, checked, reported, audited, managed and interpreted the organisation to itself could now, in many cases, be replaced or compressed by AI systems.
Continue reading “The Pope, Prince and Golgafrincham”
Category: politics
On Shumer, Citrini and the Question of Stability
You might have read Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening and/or the recent Citrini Global Intelligence Crisis report – or perhaps just read about them in the press – and be wondering how they relate to the line of thought I have been developing in the two recent posts, Why Everything Actually Adds Up and Why This Does Not Stabilise.
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Why This Does Not Stabilise
In the previous essay, I argued that several apparently unrelated developments form a single pattern: the quiet erosion of professional value, the absence of visible productivity gains, rising political volatility and a growing dependence on housing wealth to maintain living standards. Together, these point to a slow but profound shift in where value now sits in the economy.