Friday Charts: Is the Job-Pocalypse Finally Here?

Markets brace as employment data signals potential economic shift—just what crypto thrives on.

Reading Between the Lines

Friday's charts aren't just numbers—they're signals. When traditional employment wobbles, digital assets often find their footing. It's the classic 'crisis creates opportunity' playbook, and crypto's playbook is thicker than most.

The Institutional Angle

Big money's already positioning. They see turbulence in job reports as a green light for alternative stores of value. Gold had its day—now it's Bitcoin's turn. And let's be honest, watching hedge funds scramble into BTC after years of dismissal is almost poetic.

Timing the Wave

History doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Previous economic dips have consistently funneled capital into decentralized assets. This time? Expect faster moves, sharper spikes, and more mainstream adoption than ever before.

Because nothing makes people believe in decentralized finance quite than watching traditional systems stumble—except maybe watching bankers finally admit they were wrong about crypto.

This morning’s mobs data showed that employment fell in June — according to the BLS’s model, which is not to be taken literally. Still, the trend is undeniably going in the wrong direction.

The AI effect:

From the aforementioned Stanford paper, its data on developer jobs by age group shows employment has fallen sharply for the youngest employees — but risen for the oldest. We can only hope that the same is true for newsletter writers.

More data:

Brian Armstrong shares that over 40% of the code at Coinbase is now generated by AI. But he also notes that the code “needs to be reviewed and understood” by humans. That would explain the Stanford paper’s finding that experienced developers are in higher demand — and maybe confirm Joshua Gans’ thesis that AI is augmenting workers, not replacing them.

Zooming out:

The unemployment rate for college graduates has ticked up, but remains within historic norms. 

The ATM experience: 

The best time to be a bank teller was the 18 years after ATMs arrived, because they made tellers more productive and bank branches more profitable. Online banking, however, was a replacement technology.

Look familiar?

The researchers at Epoch AI predict artificial intelligence will be an augmenting technology in the first instance — causing wages to increase 10x in just over a decade — but then become a replacing technology, causing wages to crash. But Benjamin Todd notes that this assumes AI can do 100% of the jobs. “If instead humans remain necessary for just a small fraction of tasks, say 1%, then the same model shows that wages increase indefinitely.” In other words, we have somewhere between 12 and infinity years of rapidly growing wages to look forward to.

The falling cost of compute:

If AI is going to someday do 99% of the jobs, it’s going to demand a lot of power. This chart from a paper on the use of Gen AI in the workplace suggests we’ll figure out how to do it cheaply.

Not everything is AI:

Shares of Build-A-Bear are up 1,800% over the past five years — outperforming Nvidia by nearly 600 percentage points.

The long view (2):

A century of rising US employment through nonstop technological upheaval is reassuring proof that humans always find new things to do.

The example of bank branches and ATMs will still worry people, of course — even if AI is augmenting human workers now, it might replace them later.

But research by future-of-work economist David Deming suggests that employment always changes far slower than technology, so it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.  

Or ever.

“While AI helps with certain tasks of professional and managerial workers,” Deming concludes, “the demand for good ideas and cogent analysis of complex counterfactual thought experiments may be nearly unlimited.”

In other words, we might all be bank tellers making change today — and Tony Stark-like augmented humans doing superhero things tomorrow.

Let’s hope so.

Have a great weekend, augmented readers.

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