The financial technology company Block cut roughly 40 percent of its workforce last month - around 4,000 people - because of what it described as rapid progress with artificial intelligence tools. Jack Dorsey, the company's chief executive, framed the move not as a downsizing but as a reinvention of how a company operates.

"The intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company," Dorsey wrote in a social media post, according to The New York Times, "Hvylya" reports.

Not everyone bought that explanation. Several former Block employees pushed back, arguing that poor management had left the company with a bloated payroll and that AI served as a convenient cover story for the pink slips. Whatever the real reason, Wall Street did not care about the distinction - Block's stock jumped more than 20 percent after the announcement.

That investor reaction may say more about where the corporate world is heading than any earnings report. When the market hands a company a 20 percent bonus for replacing humans with machines, it sends a clear signal about which side of the job augmentation versus job elimination debate Wall Street has chosen.

Block is not an isolated case. The broader white-collar job market has cooled sharply. The US economy added only 181,000 jobs in all of 2025 despite posting 2.2 percent GDP growth - a mismatch that economists call virtually unprecedented. Finance, insurance, consulting and tech have all seen hiring slow to a near-standstill, even as companies in those sectors report solid financial performance.

The doomsday scenario for office workers is straightforward: businesses embrace AI agents as a substitute for human employees rather than as a tool to help them. Block's layoffs and the market's enthusiastic response suggest that scenario is not hypothetical anymore - it is already being priced in.

Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on how OpenAI's chief scientist warned that AI creates an unprecedented concentration of power.