The Council of Economic Advisers finally said the quiet part out loud. In a sprawling, 400-page report that reads like a eulogy for the 40-hour work week, the CEA is now demanding that tech adoption "align" with mass employability. Translation? Stop firing everyone. Or at least, stop making it so obvious that the $3,000-a-month SaaS subscription is designed to replace the $60,000-a-year human sitting in Cubicle B.

It’s a cute sentiment. It’s also about five years too late.

We’ve spent the last decade worshipping at the altar of "disruption"—a word that usually just means finding a way to skirt labor laws with a slick UI and a venture capital subsidy. Now, the government is looking at the fallout and realizing that if nobody has a job, nobody buys the gadgets. The snake is starting to eat its own tail. The CEA’s new stance isn’t some moral awakening. It’s a panic attack wrapped in white-paper prose.

Let’s look at the actual friction. OpenAI, Google, and Meta are currently locked in an arms race that costs billions in compute power alone. They aren't building these models to give your local administrative assistant a "digital co-pilot." They’re building them to solve the problem of human overhead. When a CFO looks at a spreadsheet, they don’t see a "human-complementary" partner. They see health insurance premiums. They see payroll tax. They see someone who needs a lunch break and occasional dental work.

A piece of code doesn't ask for maternity leave. It doesn't get "burnout" unless the server rack melts.

The CEA report leans heavily on the "reskilling" pipe dream. It’s the tech industry’s favorite get-out-of-jail-free card. Oh, we automated your data entry job? Just learn to code! Except the AI is already coding better than the juniors, and it doesn’t complain about the lack of free kombucha in the breakroom. We’re telling people to run toward a finish line that moves ten feet further away every time they take a step. It’s gaslighting on a national scale.

The specific trade-off here is one of cold, hard math. The report suggests tax credits for companies that use technology to "augment" workers rather than replace them. Think about that. We’re talking about using taxpayer money to bribe companies into keeping humans on the payroll. It’s a subsidy for inefficiency in a system that’s spent thirty years optimizing for the exact opposite.

Take the CHIPS Act. We’re pouring $52 billion into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. That’s great for national security and even better for the lobbyists. But have you seen a modern fab? They aren't exactly teeming with crowds of blue-collar workers. They are clean-room cathedrals where a handful of highly specialized engineers monitor robots that do the actual work. The "mass employability" part of that equation is a rounding error.

The report mentions that tech should "broaden the range of tasks" workers can do. It’s a nice thought. In reality, it usually means one person now has the workload of three, managed by an algorithm that tracks their mouse movements and blink rate. That isn't alignment. That’s a digital sweatshop with better lighting.

We’ve reached a point where the people making the policy and the people making the software are living in different realities. The CEA wants a world where technology lifts all boats. In the Valley, the goal is to build a boat that doesn't need a crew. Every time a CEO mentions "democratizing productivity," what they actually mean is lowering the barrier to entry so they can pay the next person less.

The government is trying to put a speed governor on a Ferrari that’s already doing 140 mph toward a brick wall. They’re asking for "alignment" from an industry that treats friction like a disease. It’s a noble effort, I suppose. But asking Silicon Valley to prioritize "mass employability" is like asking a shark to show a keen interest in the long-term health of the seal population.

In the end, we’ll probably get some toothless tax breaks and a few more "Workforce of the Future" task forces. The checks will clear, the startups will pivot, and the algorithms will keep getting leaner. We’ll be told we’re being "up-leveled" right until the moment our login credentials stop working.

At least the report was printed on nice paper. It’ll make for decent kindling when the power goes out.