BBC · https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y599yz0l3o
Meta's CTO says morale is the worst in 20 years, after layoffs to fund its AI race. Jesus asked what it profits to gain the world and lose your soul.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?
Mark 8:36
Meta will spend as much as $145 billion on artificial intelligence this year, and its founder has personally handed individual researchers pay packages worth more than $100 million each. To help fund the race, the company cut about 8,000 jobs this spring, roughly a tenth of its staff, and reassigned thousands of others to build the very systems many of them feared would replace them.
This month its chief technology officer told employees that morale was probably the worst he had seen in his twenty years there, as low as it was during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. One of the richest companies in human history, spending more than most nations to reach the future it wants, and the people inside it are about as unhappy as they have ever been.
There is a question Jesus asks that was made for moments like this. What does it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? He was not talking only about money. The word for soul means your life, your self, the living center of you. The trade he names is the one where you get everything you were reaching for and discover, holding it, that the thing that made you alive has quietly gone.
A company cannot have a soul the way a person does. But the people inside one can, and that is who the chief technology officer was describing. These are not workers who failed to make it. They got into the place the whole industry is told to want, the company now paying single engineers more than most of us will see in a lifetime, and the spirit has still gone out of the work. That is the part that follows you home. Most of us know a smaller version of it: the promotion, the title, the house we were sure would feel like arrival, and the strange quiet of standing inside the thing at last and sensing that something we never meant to spend is already gone.
The world is worth a great deal. The question Jesus leaves open is what you are spending to get it, and whether you will notice the price before it is paid.