The Long Read

This week: the researchers trying to map what AI actually does to knowledge workers' careers, and the Roblox CEO who built a 100-million-user platform by ignoring the ad playbook everyone else followed.

How to Help Knowledge Workers Who Lose Their Jobs to AI

Casey Newton's conversation with labor researcher Molly Kinder is one of the more honest reckonings with AI's employment effects you'll find — because Kinder refuses both the techno-optimist "new jobs will appear" reassurance and the catastrophist "everything is ending" frame. Her "Messy Middle" essay, which this interview extends, focuses on the specific workers who are neither protected by irreplaceable skill nor obviously displaced overnight: paralegals, junior analysts, medical coders, content writers. Kinder's argument is that the disruption hitting these workers is real and happening now, but that policy is designed for sudden mass layoffs, not gradual erosion of roles that are harder to see and harder to count. Newton pushes her on what intervention actually looks like — wage insurance, retraining windows, portable benefits — and Kinder is clear-eyed about which of those have evidence behind them and which are wishful thinking. Read this if you want to think seriously about the labor question without reaching for easy answers on either side.

Platformer · 22 min read

An Interview with Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki

Tyler Cowen's conversation with Dave Baszucki is worth the full transcript, not just the summary, because the most interesting material is buried in the middle: Baszucki's early decision to build Roblox without prioritizing advertising revenue, made at a time when every platform playbook said ads were the only path to scale. He explains the logic in terms that aren't nostalgic or principled — it was a structural bet that user-generated content platforms live or die on creator incentives, and ad optimization corrodes those incentives faster than almost anything else. With over 100 million daily active users, that bet has held, though Cowen presses him on whether a platform that large inevitably becomes an everything app, and whether that transformation is chosen or just gravitational. Baszucki is thoughtful on what Roblox is for kids developmentally, more guarded on questions about monetization pressure as the company matures. Read it alongside the Kinder piece and you get two very different pictures of what it means to build something around people rather than around engagement metrics.

Conversations with Tyler · 28 min read