OUR DAILY THREAD: Trump's AI Awakening

Guarding the hen house

THE SET-UP: “AI can be very ​dangerous, we have to be very careful with it.”

That’s Trump’s butterknife-sharp assessment of artificial intelligence after he spent a couple days grappling with a number of AI-generated propaganda pieces churned-out by the Iranian government.

One such concoction depicted the the USS Abraham Lincoln on fire after a successful Iranian attack that never happened. It started with a lengthy social media post … and then a press spray on Air Force One … and then he brought it up again at the first meeting of his remodeled “Trump-Kennedy Center Board”:

[Iran] showed all sorts of things happening in the last two weeks that never happened, between their kamikaze boats that don’t exist, between blowing up the aircraft carrier, one of the great ships in the world, the Abraham Lincoln on fire. They showed it on fire, I called the -- the general.

I said, uh, General, what’s with the Abraham Lincoln? It looks like it’s burning down, no. It’s not burning down, not a bullet was ever fired at it, sir. They know better. They said this is my first glimpse of AI and what they’ve done with it. They showed buildings in Tel Aviv burning to the ground, high-rises burning.

They showed buildings in Qatar, they showed buildings in Saudi Arabia burning and they weren’t burning, they weren’t hit, it was all AI, AI-based. Terrible.

Yup, Donnie. Terrible.

Of course, no one on planet Earth is doing more to accelerate AI. His Executive Orders have essentially given Silicon Valley the keys to the Executive Branch and an EZ-Pass they can use to race past most of the regulatory byways they’d have to take if all the governing agencies were not staffed with indifferent ideologues and industry shills.

Unleashed by Trump, they are flooring-it in the fast lane on the information superhighway … but the AI-generated, flame-engulfed Abraham Lincoln was his “first glimpse of AI and what they’ve done with it”?

Well, he ain’t seen nothing yet.

Last week, Jack Dorsey announced he was laying off four thousand employees at his fintech company Block. That’s 40% of the company’s human workforce. For Jack, it was as much about jump-starting the inevitable culling of human staff in favor of AI as it was a recognition that AI was doing his team’s work better, cheaper and faster:

i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

Jack may be immune to “market pressures,” but he’s a rare bird if that’s true. Because the market pressures are coming as quickly as those AI companions Google, Meta, Apple and the rest of the major AI companies want to attach to us all like lampreys on the side of a shark.

In fact, one of the things the market loves most is the elimination of employees. No hyperbole — Wall Street loves large layoffs. And they’ve loved it for … ever. Long before AI-driven disruption was a dream typed onto some incel’s subreddit —there was “corporate restructuring” and there were hostile takeovers. Both usually meant a bloodbath, with employees shown the door by a “proactive” CEO who is “positioning the company” for success … which often meant gutting it and selling off the parts.

But AI holds the promise of culling human overhead while actually improving productivity! Kinda like a neutron bomb eliminates the people but leaves the buildings intact.

Now THAT’S exciting!

And true to form, when Meta announced its plan to cull 20% of its workforce in an attempt to reallocate more capital to building out it AI infrastructure, giddy investors quickly rewarded Meta with a 3% jump in its stock price. And they are not alone, either … per CNBC:

Amazon eliminated 16,000 roles in January in an effort to reduce layers and bureaucracy, amid plans to invest heavily in AI.

Software firm Atlassian said Wednesday it’s cutting 10% of its workforce, or 1,600 employees, on plans to direct investments into AI.

So far in 2026, AI has been cited in over 12,000 job cuts in the U.S., according to the latest data from consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

Although there is plenty of reason to be skeptical about the ability of AI to do everything the “Mag Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Telsa & Nvidia) is banking on delivering … the reality is that the market is poised to participate in a brutal feedback loop with increasing AI adoption. The more companies announce big cuts to overhead in concert with big gains in productivity, the more the market will respond with increasing stock prices. Other than the rapidly burgeoning military market for AI applications—which Trump and Beerbong Hegseth are also catalyzing with a their nothing-is-forbidden attitude toward killer tech—what reason is there for the hyperscaling frenzy currently underway?

It’s all about productivity … it’s an impending revolution by orders of magnitude if you listen to the enthusiasts plying their wares on Bloomberg or in shareholder’s reports. That the man most responsible for (quite literally) pouring gasoline on the AI fire has apparently been blissfully unaware of what it is that AI does … is a perfect example of the recklessness of racing into a future of unintended consequences that could be very dark.

Sadly, the intended consequences will mount in the form of human roadkill littered along stretches of the information superhighway already in AI’s rearview mirror. It’s going to leave a lot of us behind. - jp

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AI-generated clip and old video shared in false posts about Iran striking USS Abraham Lincoln
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.A2LM9CQ

Trump Accuses Iran of Using AI as a ‘Weapon,’ Warns Reporters Must Be ‘Very Careful’
https://www.inquisitr.com/trump-accuses-iran-of-using-ai-as-a-weapon-warns-reporters-must-be-very-careful

Shrinking workforce, stagnant productivity? 3 mindsets to power growth in the agentic era
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/shrinking-workforce-stagnant-productivity-3-mindsets-to-power-growth-in-the-agentic-era/

Snowflake Research Finds AI-Driven Job Creation Outpaces Job Loss Globally
https://smbtech.au/news/snowflake-research-finds-ai-driven-job-creation-outpaces-job-loss-globally/

Google’s Gemini Task Automation Is Live, And It’s a Preview of How We’ll All Work Next
https://www.uctoday.com/productivity-automation/googles-gemini-task-automation-is-live-and-its-a-preview-of-how-well-all-work-next/

Gen AI Boosts Productivity, But Can’t Turn Novices Into Experts
https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/gen-ai-boosts-productivity-but-cant-turn-novices-into-experts

The AI Productivity Illusion: When Speed Masks Cognitive Cost
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/03/16/the-ai-productivity-illusion-when-speed-masks-cognitive-cost/