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Our financial system still treats teens like little kids who need to wait their turn. Meanwhile, by the time most Americans turn 13, they have a smartphone in their pocket and are actively participating in the economy. Teens are transacting regularly, and many are earning through digital channels, running online businesses, or pursuing a passion project. There’s a better way. SUPERVISION AND A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT We need to give teens supervised access to financial tools earlier in their lives. Let them learn financial responsibility through real experience. Help them build smart money habits in a controlled environment. By the time they hit 18, every teen should have the financial knowledgeand the confidenceto manage their money independently. Locking them out until adulthood is an outdated approach thats damaging the financial health of the U.S. consumer. On the flip side, granting full access to everyone turning 18 despite a lack of any meaningful financial experience is like handing someone keys to a car on their birthday without letting them practice driving. Its dangerous. It means a steeper learning curve, higher stakes, and tons of missed learning opportunities. Thats what we’re doing with money. Keeping teens sidelined doesnt just hold them back. It hurts the economy and undermines future growth. The rules of money were written for the few, not the many. Those with access build wealth and opportunitylike teens who get a debit card earlylearn to budget with guidance, and even get a chance to build credit before college. By 18, theyre ready for loans, apartments, and independence. Teens without those luxuries (read: a majority of the young U.S. population), are stuck using cash or borrowed accounts and enter adulthood with less real-world experience managing finances, and fewer options. The result is a system where the financial elite get a head start, and everyone else is forced to improvise with workarounds. THE COST OF WAITING Today’s teens are already an economic force. More than half report earning an income, and theyre not just working traditional jobs. Theyre running online businesses, doing creative work, and participating in the gig economy. In fact, two in five teens are earning through digital channels, outpacing those in older cohorts. And theyre completely reshaping what it means to be a consumer in America. Their demand for instant, flexible, digital-first experiences are already changing how businesses operate. Take buy-now-pay-later for example. What started as young people rejecting traditional credit cards has become a market worth hundreds of billions of dollar, with one of our brands, Afterpay, creating an entirely new payment infrastructure around transparency and avoiding debt traps. Over the next decade, teen habits will set the standard for how money is earned, spent, saved, and invested. Ignoring this shift isnt just overlooking the futureits missing whats happening right now. Instead of creating tools for a massive group of active economic participants, banks and incumbents push teens to borrow their parents’ accounts, deal with cash, or cobble together apps that weren’t designed with them in mind. In a world that’s rapidly going cashless, these workarounds aren’t just inconvenient. They delay financial learning, widen inequality, and leave an entire generation less prepared for adulthood. Lets fix the problem. ACCESS WITH PROTECTION At Block, we believe providing access and promoting safety are complementary. Through Cash App, we’ve built something different: a platform where teens can fully and responsibly participate in the digital economy while parents maintain oversight and control. With a parents or guardians sponsorship, teens can send and receive money, save, and even begin learning about investing in stocks and bitcoin. Parents get real-time transaction monitoring, customizable permissions, and a front-row seat as their teen learns responsible financial habits in a controlled environment. And this approach is working. Our data shows that teens are using these tools responsibly, and we’re setting teens up to develop confidence and capability in managing their money, two skills that will serve them throughout their lives. A CALL FOR CHANGE The technology to do this safely exists today, and the research backs it up. What we need now is a fundamental shift in how we think about young people and money. This means: Recognizing teens as active participants in the U.S. economy Building financial tools that balance access with protection Giving parents the right tools to guide their teens’ financial journey When we give teens safe, supervised financial access today, we’re not just preparing them for tomorrow. We’re accelerating the future of our entire economy. Owen Jennings is head of business at Block.
Category:
E-Commerce
Every technological revolution has its awkward adolescence. We’re living through AI’s right now. Recent research from Stanford and BetterUp has given this moment a name: “workslop.” It’s the flood of hastily AI-generated content that clogs inboxes, clutters presentations, and quietly erodes productivity. The email that reads like it was written by a committee of robots. The strategy document with oddly formal phrasing and zero original insight. The presentation deck that says nothing new. If this sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. And if you’re a manager watching your team’s output simultaneously increase in volume and decrease in quality, you’re not alone. But here’s what history teaches us: this phase is predictable, necessary, and temporary. The question isn’t whether we’ll move through it. It’s how quickly we can get to the other side. Why Workslop Happens When personal computers arrived in offices, workers treated them as expensive typewriters. When the internet became ubiquitous, we spent years learning that you can walk 10 feet to talk to someone instead of firing off another email. Each time, we mistook the tool for the solution. We’re making the same mistake with AI. Only faster, and at greater scale. The core problem is one of delegation versus collaboration. AI will deliver increased speed and efficiency, but most organizations have accidentally encouraged their people to treat it as something to offload to rather than something to work with. An associate generates a client memo with Claude and sends it along, complete with the telltale “AI can make mistakes, please double-check” footer still attached. A manager asks ChatGPT to write a strategy document and forwards it without adding context, nuance, or judgment. This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a mindset problem that technology has exposed. When content creation becomes effortless, the cognitive work of thinking deeply becomes optional. And when it becomes optional, people can opt out. What researchers are calling “cognitive atrophy” is really just a gradual disconnection from the thinking process itself. We’re delegating not just the execution, but the strategy. AI will get you 70% of the way there, but someone still needs to own that final 30%, and right now it seems some people are checking out before the finish line. The Way Through The good news? Workslop isn’t a crisis. It’s a phase. Organizations that recognize it as such can compress what might take years into months. Start by redefining what you measure. The drive to do more with less can create pressure to crank out more work in the same time, with AI as the productivity multiplier. But leaders need to resist the assumption that one person plus AI should equal twice the output. If you’re still evaluating employees primarily on volume, you’re incentivizing exactly the behavior you don’t want. Prose and code generation are now commoditized. What matters is the quality of thinking that directs these tools. In your performance management processes, assess people on their judgment, their ability to steer AI effectively, and their capacity to iterate toward genuinely excellent outcomes. Draw bright lines. Leaders need to align on the AI vision, the guardrails, and how they’ll hold people accountable. Establish explicit standards for what constitutes acceptable AI-assisted work. Some organizations are implementing simple rules: AI-generated content must be marked during internal review. Client-facing materials must demonstrate clear human value-add. Any work bearing AI watermarks or disclaimers gets automatically returned. These aren’t punitive measures. They’re cultural signals about what professionalism means in an AI-augmented workplace. Without mutual commitment from leaders to embed these standards, the bright lines blur. Embrace experimentation, but guide it. The workslop phase exists because people need room to learn, and that requires a growth mindset, not a fixed one. Risk aversion kills experimentation. Moving through this phase means reframing failure as data, celebrating what you learn from missteps, and managers modeling vulnerability about their own learning curve. Managers can accelerate this shift by tapping into people’s intrinsic motivation for mastery. But experimentation without feedback loops doesnt create change. So have forums where teams share what’s working and what isn’t, and celebrate the wins and the learnings of human-AI collaboration. Learn from unexpected sources. Universities faced the workslop crisis before corporations did. Many have developed sophisticated approaches to maintaining rigor while embracing AI tools. They’ve created assignments that inherently require human judgment, implemented systems that flag low-quality automated work, and redesigned evaluation criteria to emphasize critical thinking over production. These aren’t perfect solutions, but they’re battle-tested ones that can translate to corporate contexts. Resist the delegation instinct. The most important cultural shift is also the simplest: don’t treat AI as your copilot. Treat it like a student, and you’re the teacher. This reframes the entire relationship. You’re not handing off work. You’re responsible for what that student produces, which means staying engaged in the iterative process, using tools to enhance rather than replace human judgment, and taking full ownership of outputs regardless of how they were generated. Organizations that successfully embed this mindset move through the workslop phase measurably faster. The upside? New Stanford research tells us that employees trust AI more when they can see it as a collaborator, not a closed system. An Unexpected Opportunity Here’s what makes this moment genuinely unique: the traditional corporate hierarchy of expertise has temporarily inverted. Right now, a brilliant 22-year-old who knows how to work with AI tools can create more value than their manager who doesn’t. This isn’t a threat to experienced leaders. It’s an opportunity. Junior employees have rare insight into what actually works, and smart managers are creating channels for those employees to lead the way forward. You’re not being replaced. You’re being offered a shortcut to expertise that would otherwise take years to develop. The companies that emerge strongest from the workslop phase won’t be those that restricted AI use or pretended the problems didn’t exist. They’ll be the ones that acknowledged the awkwardness, called it out, learned from it quickly, and built cultures where humans and AI genuinely complement each other. Experience shows us that the most critical cultural factors that will shape the success of AI include the degree of autonomy of teams to shape workflows, the measures and controls put in place, and what gets rewarded and recognized. We’re in the messy middle of the AI adoption curve. Workslop is almost certainly happening in your organization right now.The only question is whether you’re managing the transition or hoping it resolves itself. History suggests which approach works better.
Category:
E-Commerce
Americans know AI runs on electricity and theyre starting to realize theyre the ones paying for it. A recent nationwide survey of more than 1,400 U.S. households found that two-thirds of Americans believe AI is already driving up their power bills, and most said they cant afford more than a $20 monthly increase. Theyre right to be worried. As tech companies pour hundreds of billions into new data centers, the surge in electricity demand is rewriting the economics of the grid and households are footing the bill for an AI power tax they never voted for. The frustrating truth is that this isnt about running out of power. As prices keep rising and politicians promise to build our way out of this crisis, we already have more than enough electricity. A broken system Whats broken is the system around us. As Chris Wright, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, recently said, “we don’t need more electrons We only need more electrons a few hours a year at peak demand. We have slack capacity 98% of the time.” Outdated pricing rules hide the real cost of peak demand, shift the burden onto ordinary people, and drive bills higher even when supply is abundant. And as AIs appetite for energy grows, that broken system is turning into a massive, invisible subsidy one that lands squarely on consumers. In 2025, U.S. tech companies will spend $300400 billion on AI infrastructure.Thats over 2% of GDP, a greater share than telecoms at the height of the Internet boom. Growing demand This industrialization of intelligence has sparked the steepest electricity demand growth since World War II. Five-year load forecasts jumped from 23 GW in 2022 to 128 GW in 2025, with data center usage projected to rise from 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 to 12% by 2030. And since January 2021, residential electric prices have climbed nearly 40%. In PJM, which covers 13 states and D.C., the cost of ensuring reliabilityknown as capacity priceshas spiked 11x in just two years, with analysts attributing two-thirds of the increase to data centers. Thats $9.3 billion in extra utility bills this year alone, or an AI power tax of $10$21 per month per household. If similar trends spread nationwide, Americans could face $1530 billion annually in AI subsidies by 2027. Unlocking capacity But the problem isnt AI, or solar panels that fail to deliver power at midnight when demand is lowestits figuring out how to unlock the slack capacity of our existing grid where and when we need it. Imagine if airlines couldnt charge more for Thanksgiving flights, so they had to buy enough planes for everyone to fly that one day. The rest of the year, those planes sit idle, but ticket prices stay high year-round to cover that wasted capacity. Thats exactly how our electric grid works today. Households and small businesses pay flat retail rates that dont reflect real-time scarcity or costwhether power is dirt-cheap at 3 a.m. or sky-high during a heatwave, you pay the same. This one price fits all approach hides the true cost of peak demand. The bill for serving those peaks doesnt vanish, its just socialized across everyones rates, driving costs up for all. Large industrial users dont face this problem. They buy electricity directly in wholesale markets, where prices fluctuate by the minute, and can shape their demand to avoid paying for expensive peaks. This flexibility allows them to reduce costs dramatically. Meanwhile, households and small businesses cant. The result is a regressive system where those least able to change their behavior are stuck paying the most. We have the technology The good news is that we already have the technology to fix this.
Category:
E-Commerce
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