WTF Is Up Report 3: Why Data Centers are Stalling and Tech Postings are Surging

Larry Port (00:00):
Dream job or nightmare? It’s hard to know if a career that looks great on paper will actually lead you to the life you want to live. So welcome to Dream Job Cafe. I’m Larry Port. I’ll be asking different professionals the questions you won’t find anywhere else. So grab a coffee, settle in. This is Dream Job Cafe. Sponsored by Wastepark.co, where we help people navigate careers in a crazy world. Hi everybody. I’m Larry Port. Welcome to the Dream Job Cafe Podcast by Wayspark and we’re here to do another WTF is up report where we take a look at how AI is affecting employment in our society and what the fuck is up? So let’s take a look. So the first one is from the economist. As such, it is international now and we’re taking a look at what China is doing. So China’s an interesting case, right? This article is called China Wants More Robots, but not fewer workers, a human first approach to automation.

(00:58):
And what’s interesting about this is that China, they want to lead the world in AI and automation, I’m reading from the article here, but not destroy jobs. And economic plan for the next five years says the country must “prevent and resolve large scale unemployment risks.” What I find interesting about this is that wouldn’t that be great if the leadership in America said the same thing? I mean, the problem is that we have kind of a dysfunctional Congress and our political situation is a little messy right now to say the least. Whereas in China, they’re able to say like, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do and no one’s going to argue with us.” And so they can just do whatever they want. We can’t really do that. But how awesome would it be if our government said, “You know what? We’re aware of this.

(01:45):
We’re aware there’s going to be large scale unemployment risks and we’re going to do something about it. ” In any case, whether those risks pan out or not, it’s nice to know that people are looking at it. I thought it was interesting, this use case is all about how their autonomous vehicles in this one city may or may not displace drivers. Speaking of politics and people reacting to artificial intelligence, AI had kind of a rough public month in May. So this article’s from the Wall Street Journal headline, The American Rebellion Against AI is Gaining Steam, Rebellion. Booed commencement speakers, block data centers, plummeting poll numbers, fast growing industry has a faster growing crisis. So look at this. All over the country, community level organizations have been succeeding in blocking data center projects. Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 48 projects valued at some $156 billion last year.

(02:42):
Now, I know we have a trillionaire now in the world, but $156 billion is a lot of money and that’s the kind of thing that gets noticed, majorly noticed. So what else is going on here? The speed of this reaction has been swift. In fact, pollsters and historians, I’m reading here again, say the sourcing of public opinion is all but unprecedented in its speed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen something intensify this quickly said some dude at Stanford who studies this kind of thing.” Also, check out this quote from an AI consultant. He says, “People hate AI. AI is less popular than ICE. AI is less popular than politicians,” he said on a podcast. That’s very unpopular. In fact, he probably picked the two least popular things in the country to say AI is less popular than. Now, this next article is called The Six Make Trends that Define 2026.

(03:41):
It’s by Derek Thompson. If you don’t know Derek Thompson, he’s a wonderful reporter. He has a Substack. He has a podcast. He wrote a book with Ezra Klein last year called Abundance. So he’s on the up and up. If I could buy stock and Derek Thompson, I would. In any case, this six megatrends articles for 2026 is an epic article worth reading. But in terms of our conversation here, I call out a couple of things. Megatrend number three, he has the state of AI apocalypse note. So with all the doomers out there saying AI, this, AI, that AI, it’s going to destroy everything. He says here, AI doesn’t yet seem to be the end of anything. Economic growth is slow and steady. The unemployment rate is still under 5%. And as of this writing, he says, little tongue in cheek, people exist because of all the doom and gloom and that AI is going to take over the universe.

(04:36):
So he then goes on to say, you got to consider some of the things that are really happening and how amazing it is. Take a look at what happened at Firefox. So Anthropic released this, you probably remember this from the news, this model where it was so dangerous that they couldn’t release it because all the cyber criminals would use it to hack into all the banks. So they released it to a select number of organizations first. Now one of those organizations was Firefox. You may or may not be familiar with the browser. If this was the year like 2004, you would absolutely be familiar with the browser, but it’s kind of like a little passe. In any case, they fixed more bugs in the month after Methos was released than in the previous 15 months combined. So 423 versus an average of what does that look like?

(05:27):
Maybe like 20, 30 a month. Absolutely amazing what people were able to do with that. So another mega trend from this article, and this affects younger workers because everything that Wayspark does and Dream Job Cafe does is help people try and figure out careers. He’s identifying this thing he’s calling the Peter Pan economy where extended adolescents, people don’t grow up. And why is that? And he says, “Today young people are grappling with a declining higher rate, lower employment levels, higher housing costs, unaffordable cities, a boomer bottleneck,” meaning a baby boomer bottleneck, which is hard to say, in the labor force and an overwhelming support for older Americans over younger Americans at the federal level and throughout the economy. And you can just kind of spiral on this one when you think about social security and what may or may not be there for younger people when they get older.

(06:26):
And he has some interesting points here. He’s talking about the bottleneck at the office. So he says, “Even after they get hired, many young people feel like they struggle to move up at their company as older workers are retiring later and hanging onto jobs longer.” So people are living longer, they’re working longer and things are harder to afford and their health spans are increasing so they’re just able to work longer. So that doesn’t bode very well for younger people trying to move up because they’re clogging the top, they’re bottlenecking the top. Now I’m sure you want to see this article. This one is from the Wall Street Journal. This is called the tech jobs that are safe from AI subheadline, layoffs keep coming, but there’s still a market for higher grade talent to harness agents. So what are they talking about here? They’re talking about how companies are trying to figure out how to implement AI internally.

(07:26):
This quote is from Aaron Levy, who is the CEO of Box, which is like, if you don’t know Box, they compete with Dropbox and companies like that. “AI is quite complicated to implement, “he says. You can be sure that every bank, every pharmaceutical company, every healthcare company, every manufacturer is going to be hiring a ton of people to go implement agents. So if you like tooling around with AI, learn how to configure agents, put that on your resume and start interviewing and talking about how effective you are at it because a lot of people… The entire economy is going to be moving in this direction and figuring how to use these things. Another kind of thing that is an interesting data point that they mentioned in the article is that Amazon is bringing on 11,000 software engineering interns and early career employees in 2026. So people are hiring young people.

(08:15):
Even though Amazon is removing a lot of people, they’re also bringing people on. So there’s kind of like this churning thing going on where especially tech companies seem to be trying to optimize themselves, but they’re still bringing on younger people to try and bring them into the mix. So it’s like they’re trying to figure out, they’re trying to right size their organizations for the AI transition and they seem to be feeling their way through as we all are to be honest. Here’s another interesting thing is that IT and computer science jobs posting are up 14.2% year over year, despite all the doom and gloom for people in the tech fields, 14.2% increase. Now, the share of senior level job postings is higher than for entry level stuff, right? So the entry level jobs, according to ZipRecruiter, has fallen a little bit, but senior level jobs has increased.

(09:10):
So not the best news, mixed news if we look at the Amazon situation for entry level like computer science people, but maybe better news for the more expert programmers who are using AI to fill in the gaps. Now one obvious kind of quote, and I think this is something that we all need to always think about is as AI handles background tasks, the core functions of these technology roles are becoming more interpersonal and human focused. So whatever you’re going to be doing in the future, I think this goes without saying, is that your people still’s got to be strong and the days of securing yourself in a dark basement and coding, those kind of things are going away. Everybody’s collaborative. That’s how it’s going to be. Now this next article is by David Solomon. He is the CEO of Goldman Sachs and his op-ed piece in the New York Times was the AI job apocalypse is overblown.

(10:12):
So Goldman Sachs is not your everyday investment bank. I mean, these people have the command of presidents and senators. I mean, no disrespect to my friends at Merrill and Morgan, they’re very important banks, but Goldman’s kind of the top dog. So they have all these economic models and he says that if our estimates prove correct, quote, “AI won’t eliminate 25% of jobs. What’s more likely is that people will find more productive ways to spend their time.” So this happened with accountants when spreadsheets came out. It happened with editors when they moved from splicing reel to reel film to online digital editing system and this is kind of called Parkinson’s law. This was identified back in the 50s and it’s not like an actual law, but it’s kind of like an observational law that happens in businesses, which is that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

(11:08):
So you get better tools, you use them. It’s not that it just eliminates work and you go home, you explore what they can do and you end up doing things better. Another thing he says is that just because a job can be replaced doesn’t mean it will be. So the television didn’t eliminate the demand for live entertainment, nor did the internet put real estate agents or fitness instructors out of business. Same thing with music. Once we got recorded music, it’s not like symphonies or live performances went away. It kind of augments what the live thing is in a lot of ways. And there’s tons of evidence of this and you start seeing it over and over again. People like to talk about the accountants. They like to talk about the ATMs and we’re going to see that. Another thing he mentions is that like companies, and we saw this earlier, is that companies are looking for people to manage agentic workflows and so on and incorporate AI into the businesses.

(12:08):
So we’re starting to see kind of some signal from all the noise when it comes to AI in the workforce. Number one, the big obvious one is that if there is a human factor involved with human to human, then AI is not going to cut it there. We’re starting to see that companies are going to need people to implement AI at companies and then we’re not always sure, I think this is where it’s a little unclear where AI is going to eliminate jobs, augment jobs or what. So enter this article by the Atlantic. It’s a little bit of a wonky piece, but bear with me. I’ll try and break it down. This is called Three Ways to Think About AI and Jobs. It’s really three questions. Whether automation will make human workers obsolete depends on more than just how smart the AI is. So what are these three questions that Mr. Karma is asking here?

(13:03):
The first one is, are the AI-able parts of a job like the clean parts is what some of these academics are calling them.

(13:14):
Are they easily separated from the non-AI-able parts of the job or messy parts? So things that can be repeated quite easily and are clearly defined things to do versus working with people negotiating things that an AI just can’t do. An example is a trial judge, something I know a lot about from my days at Rocket Matter working with these people. So you might think that there’s, for somebody that’s going to argue a trial attorney rather, somebody’s going to have to argue a case in court. Maybe some of the work can be done by AI like drafting an argument or studying facts of the case. But it turns out when that attorney is in front of the judge and has to respond to questions or argue or respond to points made by the opposing counsel or cross-examined witnesses, you can’t short change that work. It’s not like you can just have AI automate that away and not be aware of it.

(14:13):
Maybe it could help you, but the attorney has to be fully aware of what that AI is doing. So you can’t really extract the clean parts from the messy parts in that particular job. Another question is if AI is going to take your stuff, is if what you produce gets cheaper with AI, how much more of it will people want? So this is we’re going to see the ATM people again here. Now when the ATM came out, which literally stands for automated teller machine, and this happened when I was a little kid. It supercharged the growth of that profession because lower costs led to an increased demand. Now you’re going to start hearing about Jevon’s paradox. I’ve started to see it all over the literature and it’s named after this guy who correctly predicted that a more efficient steam engine was going to require more coal, not less coal.

(15:05):
And we’re just kind of seeing that play out through various different professions. But in the case of the bank teller is one of those cases. Another one is like with radiologists, I can’t begin to tell you how often I’ve heard that radiologists are going to be out of work. It turns out that since 2016, the number of radiologists has risen by 17%. Everybody thought this was the case study in a career that would be automated away because reading scans and identifying patterns seemed to be something that a computer could do quite well. But it turns out that there’s a lot of vacancies that the salary has increased and a lot of this is because there’s clean and messy stuff going on. Yes, there’s like identifying things in the picture, but then there’s talking to the patients, understanding their history and putting together this whole picture.

(15:59):
So there’s more to it than I think a lot of people realize. And then the last question Mr. Karma asks is, does AI enhance your expertise or commodify your expertise? So case in point, consider two, this is what the article talks about, consider two different types of career. There was an inventory clerk. So back in the day before you had computers like logging all of your inventory in your warehouse, there were people that had to master the warehouse and know where everything went. They were kind of like warehouse librarians. And then the counterpoint would be the accountant. So when the computer came along, the expertise that was eliminated in the case of the accountant was this kind of like not very expert stuff. It was like the spreadsheets. It was tallying. It was like doing things quickly. The higher level thinking and the expertise, the true expertise was left alone.

(16:55):
In the case of the inventory clerk, for the inventory clerk, what happened was is that all the complex stuff got automated out and the easy stuff was left over. So if the tough stuff gets automated out, then that’s when wages are going to decline. But if the tough stuff is still there and the easy stuff gets automated out, then wages will increase and that’s what happened with those two professions. So in any case, that’s kind of a snapshot of where we are with AI in the labor markets right now. At Wayspark, we’re committed to helping you try and figure out a career that is future-proofed and will thrive in this new economy. I just want to thank you for listening. If you like this podcast, please like it, tell your friends about it. And if you can, be grateful for something today. Thanks for listening.

(17:46):
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