tl;dr Block's hypothesis is that AI replaces the middle of orgs, middle management. Block plans to create an org where humans work at the edges and use bots to coordinate across the larger org.
The edge is where the intelligence makes contact with reality. People reach into places the model can't go yet. They sense things the model can't perceive: intuition, opinionated direction, cultural context, trust dynamics, the feeling in a room. They make the calls the model shouldn't make on its own, especially ethical decisions, novel situations, and high-stakes moments where the cost of being wrong is existential. A world model that can't touch the world is just a database. But the edge doesn't need layers of management to coordinate it. The world model gives every person at the edge the context they need to act without waiting for information to travel up and down a chain of command.
In practice, this means we normalize down to three roles.
Individual contributors (ICs) who build and operate capabilities, the model, the intelligence layer, and the interfaces. They are deep specialists and experts in a specific layer of the system. The world model provides the context that a manager used to provide, so ICs can make decisions about their layer without waiting to be told what to do.
Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) who own specific cross-cutting problems or opportunities and customer outcomes. A DRI might own the problem of merchant churn in a specific segment for 90 days, with full authority to pull resources from the world model team, the lending capability team, and the interface team as needed. DRIs may persist on certain problems or move elsewhere to solve new ones.
Player-coaches who combine building with developing people. They replace the traditional manager whose primary job was information routing. A player-coach still writes code or builds models or designs interfaces. They also invest in the growth of the people around them. They don't spend their days in status meetings, alignment sessions, and priority negotiations. The world model handles alignment. The DRI structure handles strategy and priority. The player-coach handles craft and people.
tbh I think the reality of this is roughly a traditional hierarchy, where middle nodes (player-coaches and DRIs) in the org tree have more children nodes, where the capabilities of nodes scale better. But framing it this way (ie vibemaxxing) is directionally aligned with where things should penultimately terminate: humans at the edges, having relatively cheap bots absorbing the coordination/transaction costs that otherwise required highly trusted humans.
Welp all these AI upgrades and square terminals still can’t process a bitcoin payment from my Zeus wallet!
that gap is the whole problem in a nutshell. the intelligence layer gets rebuilt top-to-bottom but the payment rails underneath are still fragmented — LNURL vs BOLT11 vs BOLT12, wallet interop varies, and hardware terminals like Square weren't designed with open Lightning in mind.
what Dorsey is describing (bots at edges, humans at edges, intelligence coordinating) actually requires a payment layer that bots can natively transact on. not a payments API. actual Lightning. until POS hardware treats LN as a first-class payment method the same way it does Visa, the edge still has a broken handoff.
Who am I to question Dorsey, but this is almost the opposite of my instincts.
I would think that the bots would operate best at the edges of a process, where the tasks are often well defined and scoped. It's in the hazy middle where you need multimodal communication and coordination between tasks of various types, data models, and evaluation metrics. That hazy middle seems much harder for bots than for humans.
I can see how you need a human at the edge if it's genuinely unexplored space, but that's rare and not the bulk of the activity of most companies, I'd think.
But yeah, this surprises me because my first instinct is that where humans are needed most is the communication, coordination, and integration layers.
This is perhaps an error of my framing: Block's edges are still occupied by bots (writing code) with humans communicating, coordinating, and integrating at the scale humans are good at. To the extent human employees existed to communicate, coordinate, and integrate the work of 5000 humans, it sounds like their theory is that bots (with human operators) are better at that.
It depends what the middle area is for. If the issue is one of managerial bandwidth, then there are lots of upper management largely because there’s lots of lower management.
If AI enhances managerial efficiency, then the org chart will get flattened.