The death of early career gigs, encryption, and the Thread Boys' ascendency

Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. And hello, new readers from TWIT! This week’s economic calendar can be found here.

• 📈 Trending Up: Pain … inflation in Russia … CHIPS Act cadence … conflicts of interest … power laws … a shot at a Israel-Lebanon ceasefire … authoritarian power in India … music revenues … personal cults in the digital era …

  • Trending nowhere: The software development job market …

• 📉 Trending Down: TSMC gross margins? (FT) … Fujikura’s stock (BBG) … more … AI hype? … clean business practices … incumbents in Uruguay …

Won’t someone think of the children?

I’m concerned that AI is going to decimate entry level work needed to create humans capable of doing more advanced work that AI cannot manage. Here’s the New York Times in their story on the grim nature of the junior software developer job market, making the point succinctly:

[Matt Beane, an assistant professor of technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara] observed the same conundrum with other skills in which work was being automated, like surgery and financial analysis: Beginners need more expertise to be useful, but getting the type of experience that would normally help build that expertise is becoming harder.

This is something we’ve discussed on TWiST, and I don’t think that anyone has a good answer yet to what happens when we automate the first five or ten years of a host of professions. Baby consultants? Baby I-Bankers? Baby lawyers? Baby developers? Who wants to pay full-ticket when you can get an AI agent to do the same work for a fraction of a fraction of the cost?

When we can AI-away early enough career work, who will replace retiring senior staff?

Why encryption matters

The Salt Typhoon hack is big news without the attention — election cycles have that effect. But buried in coverage of the mess was a little note that encrypted messages were — surprise — safer from foreign intrusion. It’s almost like encryption is mandatory to a well-functioning modern economy and democracy, and attempts to weaken it are self-defeating!

Who would have thought. Apart from every single person who doesn’t work for a security agency.

• Elsewhere in tech policy-land, Chinese tech companies are enduring yet more regulatory pain. This time, it’s algorithms that the central government wants to behave a bit differently than they are today.

  

  Via René DeAnda

We weren’t kidding about the The Musk-a16z administration

A few data points for your Monday morning.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, unelected bureaucrats tapped by the incoming administration to take an axe to the Federal government, “lobbied for Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the White House budget office,” per the Post. Recall that Vought was a Project 2025 leader and is a Christian nationalist.

He’s an ally of the Musk-Ramaswamy project because he, too, wants to gut the government. Anyway, here’s the Washington Post on who else is orbiting DOGE-land:

Top Musk surrogates from his business empire — including private equity executive Antonio Gracias and Boring Company President Steve Davis — are involved in planning, the people said, along with a coterie of Musk friends and Silicon Valley leaders, including Palantir co-founder and investor Joe Lonsdale, who funds a libertarian-leaning nonprofit dedicated to government efficiency; investor Marc Andreessen; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick. Ramaswamy, Musk and the Silicon Valley cohort plan to work on technical challenges to collecting data about federal employees and programs, which they believe is siloed in antiquated systems. Andreessen is acting as a key networker for talent recruitment, one person said. Those executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Gracias is a backer of xAI and is a former Tesla board member. Meanwhile, Andreessen’s firm put capital into Musk’s X purchase (though the venture firm claims that it doesn’t have enough of a stake to warrant much pull.) The rest of the names and relationships in the above I don’t think require further explanation.

I had a little worry in my head when I called the incoming White House cohort the Musk-a16z administration that I was overstressing the latter half of the phrase more than was warranted. Consider that concern disposed of.

What’s fascinating in the current techno-political moment is how fast tech went from “we don’t do politics” to “wait, it’s this cheap to buy the government?”

Now, for just a few hundred million dollars, we’re seeing folks regulated by the government prepare to run that same government. Often from the sidelines, where they don’t have to deal with icky disclosures and divestments. It’s the best of all worlds! Except for the folks who don’t have infinite cash to put to work, and thus have less of a say than we might expect — hope for? — in a democracy. One person, one vote. Unless you can fund a Super PAC.

Crypto is probably the simplest example of the dynamic. Web3-folks poured nine-figures into a host of races, and are now prepped to get what appears to be everything that they ever wanted.

In terms of political experiments, the next year will be a doozy. For example, with Musk as Trump-whisperer, how will Blue Origin fare? Now multiply that question by a few dozen-fold across the Federal government.

I wonder if Bezos, who is disliked by both Trump and Musk, will wind up becoming the billionaire that the left has always lacked. I doubt that Bezos will allow Amazon to be treated like a kickbag for four years; perhaps his pique will harden into spine? Enough to create a separate pool of billionaire-tech power? Just maybe.

For now, the Thread Boys are getting ready to run the show. And it seems that until they trip over one another, there’s not much on the horizon to slow them down.