That's great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, an aeroplane, Lenny Bruce is not afraid
While the words of the R.E.M.’s immortal It’s the End of the World As We Know It goes through your head, Jacob Coxon is afraid.
Coxon is 27. He spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic, and last week he quit. He told his coworkers on Slack, and then he told everybody, that without a change of course, AI has a real shot at ending us.
This is not, he wanted you to know, a marketing stunt.
The post hit 156 million views.
Two days later, the guy who actually runs Anthropic’s safety research agreed with him, on the record, in public: more than a 10% chance AI kills everyone within the decade. You know, the people getting paid the most to know better now think there’s a real chance the thing they’re building ends us.
Bill Gates picked this same week to remind everyone that AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice, and that any model that can design novel molecules should probably be watched closely. His foundation is putting a billion dollars behind the equalizer version of that bet.
Cool, cool, cool.
Then, on Saturday, Anthropic’s CEO published 3,800 words asking the entire industry to slow down. He committed Anthropic to giving outside evaluators the same access as an employee. Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis all said, sure, count us in.
Altman went further. He said OpenAI can’t currently deploy its most advanced model safely, because it hasn’t solved for whether the model will actually do what it’s told.
The four of them are also reportedly in talks to build a joint safety standards body.
Cool, cool, cool.
Here’s the part that irks me.
These four guys did more than anyone alive to build the race they’re now asking each other for permission to slow down in.
They set the pace.
They signed the compute contracts.
They shipped models on a breakneck release schedule, whether anyone understood what was inside them or not.
Slowing down always looks like losing rather than caution, though. So the fix is a group pact instead, because none of them trust the others enough to slow down on their own.
I’m not saying they’re wrong about the risk. I have genuinely no idea, and I don’t think they really do either. That’s the whole point of a probability estimate instead of a fact.
But I’ve got a wife and daughter. Groceries are going through the roof. There’s more than one war going on. The climate is already doing the thing they said it would do twenty years ago. The world was already on fire.
Extinction risk from a chatbot company isn’t getting the attention it deserves because we are tired. So very tired.
Affordability, not AI, is shaping up to be the actual top issue heading into the midterms. That tells you where most people’s attention already is. A Slack message from an engineer warning that the app that puts a top hat on your dog might kill us all doesn’t compute.
So no, I don’t spend a lot of my day wondering whether Claude or ChatGPT ends the species by 2036. God, I hope it doesn’t. Will it come before the Cascadia Earthquake?
I’ll be singing R.E.M., regardless.
The billionaires who built the thing they’re now afraid of would like the rest of us to be more scared, please, and preferably before Washington makes them stop on its own terms instead of theirs.
Maybe get your own house in order before you ask the rest of us to panic on your timeline.
Do your job.
Fix your shit before it goes to shit.
Please and thank you.
What else is going on this week?
Graduating in AI Era Is Like a ‘Large Recession’ for Starting Pay. Graduates in the most AI-exposed majors saw their odds of landing a job drop 5 points and their starting pay fall 13% after ChatGPT arrived, comparable to graduating into a real recession. The white collar downturn for new grads keeps showing up.
HR Must Set Boundaries as It Embraces AI Notetakers, Experts Caution. Some AI notetakers don’t even flag that they’re recording, which gets messy fast once you’re talking to candidates or employees across states with different consent laws. SHRM’s CHRO Jim Link put it well: if you’re using one of these right now, “I would want to have all of my ducks in a row.”
AI Resumes Meet AI Recruiters: Dispatches From the Automated Hiring Cycle. Candidates use AI to write resumes that beat the AI screening the resumes, so companies buy more AI to catch it, and both sides end up with less useful information than before. As Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait says, “It’s not you; it’s the system, and it stinks.”
DHS Proposes Ending 60-Day Grace Period for H-1B Workers. The rule would strip the grace period that lets H-1B workers stay in the country and look for a new job after a layoff, dropping to a 10-day window in some cases. Immigration attorney Steven Brown points out the obvious problem: a company that cuts someone two years into a three-year approval leaves them with no cushion at all.
Workday Has a New CMO. Sarah Kennedy Ellis, who spent the last decade running marketing at Google Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud and Marketo, takes over Workday’s global marketing starting in October.
Frontline Workers Want More Control, Flexibility. Most hourly workers say they’re proud of their jobs, but 69% still feel replaceable and unpredictable scheduling is their biggest stressor. Deputy CEO Silvija Martincevic says pride comes from the work itself, but feeling valued comes from how an employer actually treats you.
‘Maxed-Out’ Managers Need Backup: 4 Moves for HR. Korn Ferry’s survey of 16,000 workers found 42% say their company has thinned out its management ranks in the past year, and the ones still standing report more exhaustion than CEOs, senior leaders or anyone else on the org chart. “Some are watching senior leaders get buried in constant org change and deciding people leadership just looks like a headache,” says Ryan Starks of Rising Team.
Business Leaders Plan to Continue AI Spend, Even if Bubble Bursts. Accenture found 52% of business leaders say they’ll keep investing in AI even if the bubble pops, with just 10% thinking there’s a real bubble to begin with. “AI investment and conviction holds,” says Accenture’s Karalee Close, though whether that conviction survives an actual bust is a different question.
SHRM Rebrands Annual Conference as ‘Credentialing Academy’. SHRM is replacing its summer conference with “SHRM HR-X Live!,” which sorts attendees into four “dimensions” and hands out an HR-X credential at the end. Hmmm…
This Is My Love Letter to HR. Heather Bussing makes as good a case as you’ll find, with ADP’s backing, that HR pros have always belonged at the center of business strategy, not on the sidelines of it.
This Week in Work Tech, a Schedule Conflict Presents a Choice for Conference Goers. Two must-attend HR tech conferences are landing on the same dates this year, and Steve Smith breaks down whether to burn the frequent flier miles on Vegas or Paris, which is only a fair fight because Vegas has its own Eiffel Tower too.
Good Morning From the West Coast. I joined the Purple Acorn HR Morning Show this week to talk about how people are managing, and mismanaging, AI generated work, in case you missed it live.
In This Vintage Edition of the Punk Rock HR Podcast. A vintage edition of the Punk Rock HR Podcast resurfaces Laurie Ruettimann‘s memorial to Claudia Martinez Foster, who died on 9/11, along with her idea for a new kind of Labor Day built around remembering and service.
Pivot Spotlight: Mary Grace Hennessy: Taking the Hard Fork. Lexy Martin profiles Mary Grace Hennessy, who at 54 walked away from decades of remote consulting work to take an office job in a new city, calling it the hardest fork she’s taken since her twenties.
SS Live: AIQ x2 with Bob Pulver & Chris Havrilla. Chris Havrilla and Bob Pulver get into the growing gap between how fast AI is moving and how slowly governance is catching up, with a pointed question for talent acquisition: who’s actually auditing what’s happening inside the ATS, and why.
I Meant to Take the Week Off. David Manaster had shoulder surgery and rebuilt ERE Pro in three days anyway, mostly by talking to Claude. The real news is the new AI tool trained only on ERE’s 425 hours of TA conference sessions.
The Board Already Owns This. Companies are handing AI agents authority that used to belong to people, without separating what those systems can see from what they’re actually allowed to do, John Sumser argues.
The Edge of Now Episode 6: AI Is Moving Faster Than We Can Govern It. The sharpest line from Jason Averbook‘s conversation with Jess Von Bank is the one that sticks: superintelligence isn’t some future threshold, it’s just the point where humans lose control of the technology.
Intelligence Is Not the Same as Humanity. Jess also draws the line between what AI can compute and what makes people people: values, judgment, relationships, the stuff a model can mimic but not actually have. Thank you!
Why Your Product Is Invisible to Buyers (Even If It’s Really Good). Eight things decide whether buyers pick you over a competitor before anyone even opens a feature comparison, says Gordon Johnson, starting with familiarity: buyers choose what they know, not what’s best.
We Have a Trust Problem. Shannon Pritchett opens by joking she’d been promoted to CEO of ZoomInfo, just to point out how easy that lie would be to make searchable and permanent. The real target is recruiting’s data problem: new research finds 61% of teams believe a quarter of their ATS records are stale. That’s it?
Got To vs. Had To: How Do You Describe Your Work?. Whether recruiters describe hard assignments as things they “got to” do or “had to” do is the reframe John Vlastelica says he’s actually listening for in an interview.
People & Progress Special ...Addition.... Kristy McCann and Mike Wood take apart August’s jobs report state by state and find the good headline number, 4.1% unemployment, sitting next to a labor force participation rate that’s been sliding for months.
The Ripple Effect of HR Leadership. The most meaningful parts of an HR career rarely show up on a title or job description, Tom Darrow writes, they show up later, in the people and ideas you helped move forward.
Have a great rest of your week!