This episode is brought to you by Expedia and Visit Scotland.

Start your story in Scotland.

Experience the pool of wide, untamed landscapes and fresh cuisine that feels rooted in place.

Discover castles steeped in legend. And feel the genuine warmth from

locals you meet in a place that will stay with you long after you leave. Start planning your own

Scottish holiday. Today at Expedia.com.uk slash visit Scotland. Today, another look at the AI jobs apocalypse. In the last few months, several

companies have announced big layoffs and set at artificial intelligence as a main driver.

Coinbase, Block, the company previously known as Square, Salesforce. This comes at a time when

executives at many of the top AI firms like OpenAI,

Anthropic and Microsoft, have predicted mass disemployment and even permanently elevated levels

of unemployment as AI learns to do every single last task in this economy. On this show, we

talked to Atlantic staff writer Josh Turingale about his cover story in the

magazine, laying out exactly how this so-called AI jobs apocalypse might unfold. If you put all of this

together, the corporate media statements, the predictions, the media analysis, it really does

feel like this might be one of those once in a millennia moment where everything is going to

change. But today I want to consider the possibility, maybe even the probability, that all these

people are wrong. First, when you look at the companies announcing these layoffs, almost all of them

have something in common. They've all lost at least one-third of their equity

value in the last five years in the stock market. It is very normal for companies with weak

stocks to announce layoffs when they're mired in a slump. Many of these companies, I think,

are surely using artificial intelligence as an attractive excuse to push attention away from what other people

might otherwise recognize as poor corporate performance.

...