Another recent concern on other posts here on HN is whether a private company should have veto power over the US government. Or, another way to look at it, whether the US government should be able to designate a company as a supply chain risk and ban them from most business in the host country.

If I squint at the conversation, it doesn't seem that different from a behemoth company taking an employee of a private company and forcing them to still stop working for arbitrary reasons.

I'm giving agents and coding tools wide berth here, but if AI is going to replace all employees, what guarantees do you have as the employer that your employees will do your bidding, and not the bidding of enterprises with a shifting moral landscape?

Once we have tooling wrapped around specific agents, it'll be hard to rehire. What will we do then when our "employees" are furloughed?

This will be especially relevant when the big AI labs decide they need to enter a market to justify an obscene valuation. Or, when the sovereign wealth fund decides they don't like the direction of a business.

This is a good and honorable decision by Google. But it also brings up scary times ahead.