How AI agents "radicalized" a top Meta exec into quitting her job

This podcast touches on AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout.

The argument has significant emotional appeal — who doesn’t want to believe that technology will create more jobs than it eliminates? And yet I try to apply extra skepticism whenever anyone tells me what I want to hear. Which is why my ears perked up over the past 14 episodes when founders like Wabi’s Eugenia Kuyda told me that she was no longer hiring junior engineers, and Replit CEO Amjad Masad told me the company had begun to replace big enterprise software contracts with home-coded alternatives.

For our final episode, I wanted to speak with someone who has considered the problem from all the major perspectives we’ve covered here from the start: operator, software builder, and civic leader. And that wish led me to Shih Shih.