AI: Towards Structurally Higher Unemployment in the United States

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, dropped a bomb on X with a phrase that sends chills down the spine. Behind the irony of this tweet hides a reality that markets, companies, and workers are only just beginning to digest. AI is no longer knocking at the door, it is already inside.

When a Web Pioneer Signs the Death Certificate of Human Work

Yesterday, Chad Hurley, one of the three co-founders of YouTube, sold to Google for $1.65 billion, posted on X a cryptic but heavy phrase: “Hope everyone enjoys their last year of meaningful work! ” That is, in English: “I hope everyone is making the most of their last year of useful work.”

It’s hard to know whether the Californian billionaire is joking, worried, or provoking. But the timing is anything but trivial. This tweet comes at the very moment artificial intelligence stops being a conference topic to become an economic bulldozer.

Proof? On February 26, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, CEO of Block Inc., and Bitcoin maximalist, announced the elimination of more than 4,000 jobs in his group, nearly half of its workforce. Not because the company is doing badly. Block shows solid results. 

Jack is laying people off because AI allows him to produce as much or even more with half the number of people. Wall Street immediately approved the choice: the stock jumped more than 20% in after-hours trading.

AI, a Wave Nobody Can Stop

Hurley’s tweet does not come out of nowhere. It resonates with a series of converging signals that together paint a worrying picture for the global labor market.

On February 22, 2026, Citrini Research, an American financial blog, published a 7,000-word essay imagining the state of the job market in 2028. The document describes an economy devastated by AI: a U.S. unemployment rate rising from 4.3% to over 10% within two years.

Quiet at its release, the text went viral within hours in trading rooms and among strategists, to the point of being cited among the factors contributing to the Dow Jones’ 800-point drop the following day.

On the Federal Reserve side, Raphael Bostic, outgoing president of the Atlanta Fed, drove the point home in an interview given to Reuters: the United States could enter a period of “structurally higher unemployment,” as companies substitute algorithms for white-collar workers. A statement weighing on expectations, as the U.S. monthly employment report is awaited for March 6.

The markets, meanwhile, have already delivered their verdict. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq recorded their largest monthly drop in nearly a year in February. Software sector stocks are wobbling. And according to Forrester, the U.S. economy could lose 10.4 million net jobs by 2030.

What Hurley has understood, and says with the cold irony of someone who built his fortune on disruption, is that this time, AI no longer complements humans. It replaces them. And the timeline is tighter than expected.