The AI layoffs are backfiring. Ford dumped workers for the robots, then hired them back, and Hunter says a hiring boom is next.
AI layoffs or AI hiring boom? This week the news carried both: more companies cutting thousands of jobs and citing AI, and Ford rehiring the engineers it laid off after the AI could not finish the job alone. Hunter Powers argues the unpopular side: the layoffs are a transition-period panic, AI is a multiplier on human workers rather than a replacement for them, and once companies figure that out they will need more humans, not fewer. Daniel Bishop pushes back with the economy that exists outside the S&P 500 and the jobs AI has not touched yet.
Along the way: token maxing, the new corporate habit of grading employees on how much AI they use instead of what they produce, and why using the most expensive model for everything is a bad strategy even if you can afford Fable. Hunter confesses to a $300 a month Grok Super Heavy subscription (his worst one) and runs a Claude computer use test that scrapes LinkedIn resumes after OpenAI's Atlas browser fails. Self-driving cars turn out to be the honest timeline for when AI actually replaces anyone. Plus: which apocalypse do we get if AGI arrives, Terminator or the Iain M. Banks Culture series utopia? And Gary, our payphone producer, calls in live on episode 200.
What does an AI layoff actually prove, that the job was replaceable or that the company was guessing? They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro)
4:02 Episode 200 Gary Promo
5:20 AI Layoffs or Hiring Boom
8:32 AI as Human Multiplier
11:21 Ford Rehires After AI Layoffs
13:15 Token Maxing
19:10 Claude Computer Use
23:02 AI Coworkers, Not Replacements
24:45 AGI Utopia or Terminator
26:03 Sign-Off
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COMMENT
Tell us the dumbest AI metric anyone at your job is actually graded on. Token counts? Prompts per day? Worst one wins.
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