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The U.S. housing market is a far cry from what it was in the post-war era. Back then, the median home price sat at about $7,300, or about $101,000 adjusted for inflation. Gen Z and Millennials are especially struggling to score the purchase that’s considered the heart of the American dream. The median first-time homebuyer bought their home at age 40 last year, up from the early 30s from just a decade ago. And now, prospective homebuyers are being walloped by a competing reality: an encroaching AI-driven “jobpocalypse,” which could push homeownership even further out of reach—or erase the prospect altogether.

“I think that AI and the potential for AI layoffs is a major part of that economic anxiety that’s holding people back from making a commitment to buying a home—even though it got more affordable to buy one,” Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, told Fortune.

A new survey of 4,000 U.S. residents conducted by Ipsos and commissioned by real-estate brokerage Redfin found that nearly 3 in 5 Americans (59%) think AI will eliminate jobs and make it even harder to afford homes. Not only do Americans have to contend with rising home costs, but they now have to fear the loss of their jobs due to AI—moving the goalposts even further from achieving the American dream.

The situation has grown dire for Gen Zers—so dire in fact that many parents of young adults have stepped in to help out with a down payment. With older generations holding the overwhelming majority of wealth in the U.S. today, one way we’re seeing the Great Wealth Transfer play out is with parents helping with housing costs and even prioritizing homeownership over college tuition, seeing it as the more transferable and tangible component of generational wealth.

AI’s impact on the housing market

Fairweather said negative attitudes around AI could actually be contributing to cold feet in the housing market. While mortgage rates have been elevated over the last few years, she said a recent dip in rates should’ve led to an increase in home purchases. But that was not the case, something she attributes to economic anxiety driven by AI fears.

“People are very concerned that they’re going to get the short end of the stick with [AI],” she said. “I think it goes back to just how other technological advancements have been handled and how jobs that used to be good-paying middle class jobs have been automated away.”

The sentiment is the same across political ideology. About 63% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans agree that advances in AI will eliminate jobs and make it harder to afford homes.

Still, many Americans believe AI will have the exact opposite effect. Thirty percent of those surveyed said advances in AI will help boost the U.S. economy and will, therefore, help more people afford homes. 

While a growing chorus of business leaders sing to the praises of AI’s productivity potential, the reality on the ground hasn’t yet reflected predictions of sweeping layoffs. Tech companies like Jack Dorsey’s Block and Australian-American firm Atlassian have attributed wide-spanning layoffs to AI so far this year. But a study published last month revealed that thousands of company executives have yet to see real employment or productivity impact from AI.

“Part of these fears could be overblown because of all of the rhetoric about how transformative AI will be,” Fairweather said. “But that could just be hype.”

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One of the greatest scientific achievements in human history became a political liability almost overnight. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, scientists identified the virus, deciphered its secrets, concocted a vaccine, put it into production, and endered the disease manageable – all within a year. No civilization had ever moved that fast. 

The response? The Trump administration jeered individual scientists, cut funds, fired specialists, and shuttered bureaus. It’s almost like we opened fire on the triumphant GIs returning from World War II. How did triumph turn into a culture war? And what can be done about it?

Where Science Failed First

Start with what the scientific establishment got wrong: first, the CDC’s testing debacle. The agency lacked the capacity to oversee the mass testing that a pandemic requires. Worse, its test technology cratered (thanks to a manufacturing glitch) and the agency — in classic bureaucratic mode — did not seek help from private industry. The FDA made things worse by refusing to approve alternatives to the test that didn’t work. Without tests, policy makers could not track the disease; they were flying blind. Here’s the first lesson: The fix: The CDC should get out of the pandemic test production business and work more closely with the nation’s biopharma companies to develop diagnostics as new infections emerge.

Second, scientists never managed to explain why their guidance kept shifting — and this bred suspicion. Simple answer: They were learning about the virus. The shifting advice on masking stirred anger because few people — in government, the media, or the public — understood where it came from. Tony Fauci was not just jerking the country around.

Early on, researchers assumed COVID behaved like influenza. Then they discovered it spreads via asymptomatic carriers — a crucial difference that demanded new guidance seemingly out of nowhere. Fauci wasn’t being evasive; science was evolving in real time. The lesson: Scientists must bring the public along as understanding changes, not just announce new conclusions.

The Untold White House Story

The attack on science has a political history that’s rarely told in full. It started with lack of White House preparation for a pandemic. The National Security Council had disbanded its unit devoted to biological threats, and the intelligence community took more than a month to get Covid on the President’s daily intelligence briefing. Even then they brushed it aside.

Everything changed in the first week of March. New York City became a death zone. President Trump was reportedly shaken by footage of refrigerator trucks backed up to the mortuary at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, not far from where he grew up. The Stock Market tanked. The NCAA cancelled March Madness. Businesses shuttered. Schools closed. Dr. Deborah Birx took over as the White House Covid coordinator and built a model (accurately) projecting unimaginable deaths: 100,000 to 240,000 over the next two months.

Against that backdrop, Donald Trump, after denial and equivocation, responded sensibly. Off camera and off Twitter, he made tough decisions. He listened to his health advisors, weighed their advice against challenges from the economists, closed borders, endorsed shutdowns, and—most dramatically—tossed aside normal procedures and merged science, logistics, and great piles of cash to develop a vaccination at, well, warp speed.

How Politics Poisoned the Well

But by April, the shutdowns were taking a toll, the presidential election was heating up, and Trump was getting earfuls from his business associates. The economic team, led by Kevin Hassett, then former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, whipped up new, friendlier projections of only 26,000 Covid deaths by Memorial Day — more people than that had already died when the model was unveiled. The new estimates made Trump deeply suspicious of his health care team. 

Suspicion turned to anger when scientific leaders kept contradicting his embrace of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and convalescent plasma. He turned on them publicly — casting the FDA, CDC, and NIH as deep state conspirators dedicated to defeating him.

In mid-April, anger turned to rebellion. Trump cheered small bands who were brandishing firearms, waving Trump flags, and denouncing the shutdowns. His tweets amplified the struggle to “liberate”  America from both Covid restrictions and his enemies: the overweening elites — scientists, bureaucrats, Democrats — who had dreamt them up as expert overreach.

Trump went one tweet too far, however, when he blasted the FDA’s Covid vaccine trials for moving too slowly (“just another political hit job”). That moved nine pharmaceutical companies to buy newspaper ads pledging not to release any vaccines before they were proved safe and effective. To prove vaccines’ safety, FDA extended clinical trials by several weeks so that FDA approval  came after election day – permanently entangling the FDA in the MAGA epic of a rigged election.

The Anti-Vax Vanguard

The turn against science got its final push when Trump mentioned his own COVID vaccination at a post-election rally — and heard boos. He pivoted immediately, joining the anti-vax movement he had inadvertently helped create. No surprise that a second term Trump should tap Robert F Kennedy, Jr. — and DOGE — to “go wild” on health and science. A rebellion against vaccinations and public health raced through conservative precincts. Twenty-six states enacted new and stringent limits on long-standing public health authorities that were already hollowed out from years of budget austerity.

But scientific facts are stubborn things. As historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, the anti-expert tradition rises and falls in waves across American history. Rising measles infection rates — and the political liability of owning a public health crisis heading into midterms — appear to be shifting the tide. Kennedy and his allies are already softening their vaccine skepticism.

What Comes Next

The path forward requires more than policy fixes, though those matter. Scientists need to communicate evolving knowledge in real time. Politicians need to resist weaponizing uncertainty. Agencies need the funding and flexibility to respond at scale.

But ultimately, protecting society demands something deeper: a nation of people who pull together, who care for one another, who reach across their divisions and mind the health and safety of their neighbors. We’ll never do well against pandemics until we learn to channel what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We won’t beat the next infectious threat without them.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Sarah London operates on the front lines of the toughest terrain in U.S. health care. She’s the CEO of Centene, an insurance giant providing government-sponsored plans at a time when funding is tight, costs are rising, and policy shifts create intense uncertainty.

While the St. Louis–based managed care insurer saw revenue grow almost 20% last year, to $194.8 billion, it posted a net loss of $6.7 billion. That was largely driven by a write-down that reflected the new reality for health care companies under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by President Trump. Along with cutting federal Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over 10 years, the law raises costs and reduces eligibility for people enrolled in Affordable Care Act (ACA) Marketplace plans.

Those changes are shaking up Centene’s core businesses. More than half of Centene’s revenue comes from Medicaid—it’s the country’s biggest Medicaid insurer—with the rest roughly divided between Medicare and Marketplace plans. While analysts don’t expect federal cuts to have a massive impact on Centene’s top line, they’re a sign of the challenges London faces.

Faced with new data that showed its ACA plans were enrolling both fewer and sicker people, London decided to withdraw earnings guidance last July, causing Centene’s share price to fall 40% in a single day, to an eight-year low.

“It’s hard not to feel like pulling guidance and cutting the stock in half is a failure,” London told Fortune in a recent interview. “We’ve watched a new normal unfold in terms of how many different pressures there are on the system and the magnitude of the change we’re facing.”

London is pushing to get ahead of that change. She’s been transforming Centene’s portfolio, technology, and culture since becoming CEO four years ago, at the age of 41, making her the youngest woman to lead a Fortune 500 company (a distinction she still holds).

Under London, Centene is using data and technology to better manage a business that cares for a higher proportion of sicker patients than many other insurers do. She has also launched a One-CenTeam initiative to make Centene a catalyst in creating healthier communities. In May 2024, at the Fortune Brainstorm Health conference, for example, London announced plans to partner in building $900 million of affordable housing in eight states to help boost health outcomes.

Other Centene initiatives spotlight preventive health measures that could help members avoid expensive medical problems—and leave Centene with a healthier bottom line

Mission-driven

After graduating with a history and literature degree from Harvard, London spent two years in the film industry before deciding she wanted to make a bigger social impact. She did stints at Harvard, supporting health, education, and equity initiatives, and at nonprofit Health Leads, building out its model of community-based care, before earning an MBA at the University of Chicago. Her goal: to move from storytelling to systems thinking, using data to drive change.

That mission drew her to Humedica, a pioneer in leveraging big data in public health. “Sarah sort of cold-called me in 2011,” recalls former CEO Michael Weintraub. “It wasn’t, ‘Hi, hello.’ It was, ‘I researched your company; this is what I work on. I’ve heard about your team; this is who I want to work with.’ We made a decision to hire her that day.”

London rose through the ranks at Humedica, which became part of UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, before joining Centene in 2020. She got the top job there in 2022 after longtime CEO Michael Neidorff stepped down shortly before his death.

Neidorff had built Centene from a regional Medicaid plan in St. Louis with about $40 million in annual revenues to the nation’s largest Medicaid managed care organization. With that growth came a lot of acquisitions and bloat. “The mission orientation was there from the get-go—that’s our superpower—but there hadn’t been as much focus on operating discipline,” says London, who subsequently sold off several noncore operations.

What distinguishes London’s leadership is an ability to connect the dots, says Karen Salfity, whom London brought in from Optum to create a more consistent strategy and member experience. “Sarah can look at a very complex situation, understand the various factors, and then create an assessment … with just enough heart that you know she cares deeply,” says Salfity, who has known London for 15 years. “The only thing that’s really changed is the scale at which she is able to do it.”

A new normal

London knows all too well that a lot of factors in health care are outside her control, not least of which is the Trump administration’s push to radically modernize and streamline federal programs. In February, the administration announced new steps to crack down on alleged fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, on top of the funding cuts and expired ACA tax credits that have already taken effect.

London is not as disheartened as one might think. “You could take a step back and come away with the conclusion that these [programs] are under attack,” she says. But she notes that there was “quite a bit of bipartisan support” for making the sector more efficient.

“I have yet to meet a politician who does not believe that affordable, high-quality health care is something very important to be able to provide for their citizens and voters.”

She sees the current reforms as underscoring the need to take a holistic, high-tech approach to caring for vulnerable populations. Indeed, some of Centene’s systems anticipated the changes that the administration has enacted. “We have work programs in more than 17 states; we partner with nonprofits and provide job training to Medicaid members,” London says. “We run every single claim through 75 algorithms every day to look for fraud, waste, and abuse.”

“Health care is wildly overdue for a digital revolution,” she argues, pointing to an array of tech initiatives that Centene has implemented. Those range from designing supplemental food benefits where there are food deserts—”because we know that if you don’t have access to food, medication adherence goes down”—to predictive algorithms identifying members likely to have high-risk births and mobilizing resources to support them. As London notes, “41% of all babies born in the U.S. are born onto Medicaid”; it’s crucial that the program keeps those children healthy so they can “go and get jobs and contribute to economic mobility and all the things we want as part of the American Dream.”

London knows how tough it is to deliver on that dream. “The country is getting poorer and sicker,” she says. “The dollars are not infinite. At the finite boundaries, you have to make decisions about what you are going to fund and what you are not.”

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Grab will acquire Foodpanda’s Taiwan business for $600 million, in the superapp’s first foray outside Southeast Asia. The Singapore-based company signed a deal with Foodpanda parent Delivery Hero just one year after Uber abandoned its bid to buy the Taiwanese platform, citing regulatory pushback.

The acquisition is set to complete by the second half of 2026, and Grab plans to fully migrate all users, merchants and drivers to its platform by early 2027. 

“This is a natural next step for Grab, as our experience in Southeast Asia is a direct fit for this market,” said Grab CEO Anthony Tan, in a press statement on Monday. “Our longstanding expertise in managing complex delivery logistics for dense and high-traffic cities is well-suited for Taiwan.”

Analysts call the deal a timely move for Grab, with Maybank Securities analyst Hussaini Saifee describing it as “a compelling new growth leg” for the Southeast Asian company given Taiwan’s robust economy.

The expansion also vindicates Grab’s business model, which has dominated Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing and food-delivery market for close to a decade. The company is now “exporting its playbook,” says Tan Joo Seng, an associate professor of business at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Tan calls Grab’s move a faster way to get access to Taiwan’s market, rather than building something from scratch, like “taking a high-speed train instead of laying the tracks.”

Foodpanda Taiwan generated $1.8 billion in gross merchandise value last year, despite having only 10% user penetration amongst Taiwan’s population, according to a Maybank Securities research note.

If the deal goes through, Grab will have a presence across 21 cities in Taiwan, with Uber Eats being the platform’s only major competitor. 

Uber made a bid for Delivery Hero’s Taiwan business in May 2024. Yet Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission raised antitrust concerns around a merger between the two platforms, which together account for roughly three-quarters of the market. Uber, which also operates a ride-hailing business in Taiwan, eventually dropped its bid early last year. 

Delivery Hero is under pressure from investors to divest some of its overseas businesses, if not an outright sale of the whole company. Aspex, a Hong Kong fund that’s Delivery Hero’s second-largest shareholder, threatened to replace CEO Niklas Östberg if he didn’t do more to sell parts of the company, Bloomberg reported in mid-March.

Grab isn’t the only company expanding to Taiwan. Both Singapore-based Sea, as well as South Korea’s Coupang see Taiwan as an increasingly important business for their e-commerce platforms.

In a LinkedIn post, Grab CFO Peter Oey described Taiwan as a “structurally compelling market” with high urban density, strong consumer spending power and a digital economy driven by the AI and semiconductor boom. (Taiwan’s economy grew by 9% last year, the highest level since 2010).

Tan, from NTU, calls Taiwan the “perfect bridge” to the rest of North Asia, citing its high density and digital-friendly consumers.

Grab’s regional expansion

Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling founded Grab in 2012 as a mobile app to provide safe taxi-hailing services in Malaysia. Since then, it’s expanded across eight Southeast Asian markets, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines. It holds a 55% share of the market, and outcompeted both domestic players like Indonesia’s GoTo and global giants like Uber. 

After starting with ride-hailing, Grab has expanded its suite of offerings to include food and grocery deliveries and cashless payments, making it one of Southeast Asia’s leading superapps. 

Grab, No. 128 on the Southeast Asia 500, reported record annual profits of $268 million last year, on top of $3.4 billion of revenue. 

Grab shares, which trade on the NASDAQ, rose 2.3% on Monday, after the company announced its acquisition of Foodpanda Taiwan. Shares are down by over 20% for the past 12 months.

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When Palantir CEO Alex Karp predicted that AI would erode the economic power of “humanities-trained, largely Democratic voters” in favor of “working class, often male voters,” he wasn’t making a forecast. He was making a choice — and calling it destiny.

That distinction matters more than whether he’s right.

AI has advanced faster than almost anyone expected. Recent geopolitical shocks have compounded the uncertainty. But the real question isn’t who wins or loses in Karp’s vision — it’s whether that vision is the one we want to build.

Disruption Isn’t the Same as Progress

The AI era has generated extraordinary wealth. Nvidia and Microsoft are each worth trillions. ChatGPT now reaches 900 million weekly users. By conventional measures, the revolution is working.

But U.S. unemployment hit a four-year high last November. The wealth gap between the top 1% and bottom 50% has widened since ChatGPT launched. Rapid advancement and record market performance are not measures of success — they’re measures of speed.

A technology capable of unprecedented scientific discovery and work automation should do more than reshuffle economic winners. It hasn’t, largely because industry and government have failed to define what outcomes they actually want AI to deliver — or who it should serve.

Trust Is the Missing Ingredient

People adopted the smartphone because they could see how it would improve their lives. Nobody adopts a technology framed as replacing them.

Yet that’s exactly how some of AI’s loudest advocates describe it. The result is predictable: wariness, skepticism, and a widening gap between immense capability and actual value.

For AI to endure — commercially and socially — people need to trust it. That requires them to feel its benefits directly.

Where AI Should Actually Go to Work

If AI is eliminating manual labor, the economically and socially prudent move is to direct that capacity toward the sectors most starved of it: healthcare, human services, and infrastructure.

These industries face acute labor shortages and stretched staff. They’re also where automating manual tasks would be most transformative without displacing workers:

• Doctors spending more time diagnosing and treating patients instead of documenting visits
• Caseworkers staying in their roles because their jobs no longer consume their weekends
• Transit systems running more reliably as maintenance and reporting become automated

That’s not disruption. That’s progress.

Build With Workers, Not For Them

The US leads in AI talent, research, and infrastructure. The challenge isn’t building the technology — it’s pointing it at the right problems.

One meaningful shift since ChatGPT’s launch: the skills threshold to harness AI has dropped dramatically. LLMs, vibe-coding, and accessible tools mean that building and tailoring technology is no longer reserved for elite college graduates. Frontline workers — the ones who actually understand what’s broken in healthcare or social services — are no longer locked out.

A software engineer knows nothing about being a doctor or a caseworker. If AI is going to serve our most critical workers, industry must build it with them, not for them. Government procurement must do the same. That’s how you get both value and trust.

Stop Predicting. Start Deciding.

Karp is right that AI will reshape economic power. Where he’s wrong is treating that reshaping as inevitable rather than engineered.

The problems most in need of solving aren’t hidden. We know where inequality lives. We know which services are buckling. If the leaders building this technology want it to last, they should stop predicting who gets left behind — and start deciding who gets lifted up.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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The days of grinding at your desk from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. are officially numbered. Imagine clocking off an hour earlier every single day and still taking home the same salary. Billionaire entrepreneur and former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban says artificial intelligence is about to make it happen.

“Smart, bigger companies will enable their employees to create and use agents (within security guardrails), improve their productivity,” Cuban just wrote on X. “But most importantly, they will reduce their workday by an hour to start. Same pay.”  

He added that working from home already “dilutes” people’s start and finish time, but that forward-thinking companies will put an official policy in place that cuts the workweek down by at least 5 hours. “It’s a step that sets the tone in a company,” he added.

“Reward people doing the daily with more time.”  

It’s a bold call—but Cuban, who built and sold Broadcast.com (“the YouTube” of his era) for $5.7 billion and has backed hundreds of companies on Shark Tank, has a track record of spotting workplace shifts before the mainstream catches up.

He even taught fellow self-made multimillionaire Emma Grede—the founder behind Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Khloé Kardashian’s Good American—how to make the most of AI early on. He had over 60 AI apps on his phone at the time. So he knows more than most how many hours these tools can claw back.

And his argument is that the smartest companies will give that time back to their workers.

The 40-hour workweek launched 100 years ago—and it’s no longer fit for purpose

The standard 9-to-5 schedule hasn’t had an overhaul since Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford brought the 40-hour workweek to the Western world a century ago, in 1926—eight hours of labor, for eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. At the time, it was a 19th-century worker’s dream.

However, between commutes, school runs, and last-minute holdbacks in the office, it took the world shutting down to realize that 8-8-8 had slowly morphed back to something more like 12-6-6. Working from home briefly allowed workers to claw back some of that time. Families ate breakfast together again. Parents walked their children to school. That mismatch between productivity and presenteeism became impossible to ignore, and post-pandemic workers simply refused to go back “to normal”.

Already, office staff is crafting informal “dead zones”—hours or even days when they’ve unofficially checked out.

Studies show productivity plummets between 4 and 6 p.m. as employees slip into COVID-era habits of gym runs and school pickups. Many have also quietly dropped Fridays, echoing America’s Got Talent judge Simon Cowell, who recently said he stopped working them altogether because they were “pointless.” Emails get left unanswered, and the few still at their desks can’t get a meeting in the diary.

Now, with governments around the world once again pushing remote work and even four-day workweeks in the wake of the war in Iran, the pressure on the traditional workweek is building from every direction. And for workers already stretched thin by stagnating wages, “peanut butter” raises and a cost of living that keeps climbing, an hour back every single day—with no dent to their paycheck—isn’t just a perk. It’d be the first real raise many will have seen in years.

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At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”

At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”

Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction. Clients are required to abstain from the internet, smartphones, gaming, and other technologies—often for months at a time. On her first day there screen-free, Hill lay down on her bed and cried.

Hill and reSTART’s other clients are at the center of an intense debate about how harmfully addictive modern tech can be. Once waged mostly in academic white papers and over dinner tables, it has escalated to the courts, thanks to a slew of landmark legal cases against Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. (The last two reached settlements earlier this year. TikTok declined to comment for this article, and Snap did not respond to requests for comment.) These initial “bellwether” cases are being closely watched because their outcomes could provide precedent for the thousands of other lawsuits filed making similar claims—and even force tech companies to change their products and business models. Some have anticipated a “Big Tobacco moment”—a reference to the 1990s lawsuits against tobacco companies that proved they were aware of the addictive nature of nicotine and the health dangers of smoking, and led to massive damages paid.

On March 25, California jurors delivered a blow to Meta and YouTube, and validated the concept of “tech addiction” by ruling that the companies were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms. They awarded the plaintiff, known as KGM, a combined $6 million in damages. The now 20-year-old plaintiff had testified in February that the “addictive design” of these platforms, including infinite scroll, filters, and autoplay, led her to spend up to 16 hours a day on them, causing depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, and self-harm.

“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” a Meta spokesperson said when reached for comment after the ruling. A spokesperson for YouTube parent company Google said the company also disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site,” the spokesperson said.

The Big Tech companies have long denied claims about “addictive design,” saying they did their best to protect free expression while keeping users safe. They also question the whole concept of “tech addiction,” pointing out that there’s no scientific evidence that their products were the cause of KGM’s and others’ issues. The head of Meta’s Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in court that social media was not “clinically addictive.” And in a written statement prior to the verdict, a Meta spokesperson pointed to other factors in KGM’s life as the cause of her troubles, adding: “The evidence simply doesn’t support reducing a lifetime of hardship to a single factor, and our case will continue to underscore that reality.”

Reached for comment about YouTube during the trial, a spokesperson for owner Google, José Castaneda, said allegations about the platform were “simply not true.” “Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said. He pointed to the company’s “services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls.”

Chona Kasinger for Fortune

But concerned parents—along with researchers, health organizations, and even some former tech industry leaders—are sounding the alarm, saying that the systems we rely on for modern life are designed in ways that may be fundamentally incompatible with human well-being. They cite a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience arguing that social media use delivers dopamine jolts similar to those associated with addictive drugs like meth or heroin. And with the rapid acceleration of AI, many are calling for the U.S. government to get serious about regulation and pleading with Big Tech to provide stronger safety features that constrain the algorithms, push notifications, and endless swiping that make it so hard to put your phone down.

“Unfortunately, [tech] is taking mostly young people away from the most important thing in their lives and key to their mental health, and that is relationships with other people,” says New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway. For tech companies, he says, it’s all about keeping users’ attention locked in: “I don’t think [Big Tech] set out in their business plans to depress global youth. I think their algorithms discovered that rage, self-esteem, and funny cat videos just keep people online.”

There is, of course, a difference between the kind of low-level “addiction” to our phones that most of us jokingly will cop to—checking email before we’re out of bed, scrolling TikTok in the grocery line—and the rarer, all-consuming dependency that leads people to places like reSTART or into courtrooms as plaintiffs. At the same time, the line between a bad habit of using tech several hours a day and a behavioral addiction can be blurry, especially for teens and young adults whose social lives, homework, and entertainment all run through the same devices.

And that’s the whole point, argues Roger McNamee, a former tech investor and author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. “These companies are in the business of attention,” he says. “Once they had attention, they were in the business of controlling the choices available to people in order to influence their behavior in ways that were profitable for the platform. That culture and that business model were guaranteed to produce lots of harm.”

With its constitutional and cultural emphasis on the importance of free speech, the U.S., unlike many other countries, has largely declined to tell tech companies how they should interact with users. That has had dire effects, McNamee says: “We went from a culture where we used tech as an empowering tool to viewing tech as a tool for controlling people and extracting value. That’s the culture of the Valley, and the underlying behaviors that that causes are wrecking our democracy, wrecking public health, and wrecking our economy.”

The reluctance to place limits on how tech products engage users, especially in the age of AI, “should disturb everybody,” he says.

The $1,000‑a‑day residential program helping gamers and social media addicts reclaim their lives

Some 25 miles northeast of Seattle, past towering Douglas firs, sits the gray-paneled, split-level reSTART clinic. Motivational posters and pillows with phrases like “Healing is not linear” adorn its common areas. The center can house up to 16 clients, who share rooms and are responsible for household chores. They also are required to participate in 24 to 30 hours of structured group and individual therapy each week. reSTART teaches clients multiple evidence-based coping and recovery strategies, ranging from box breathing to physical grounding exercises. The treatment isn’t cheap. As an out-of-network provider, reSTART’s rate averages about $1,000 per day, though the clinic encourages clients to check with their insurers to see what can be covered. The average length of stay is 12 to 16 weeks, and many continue on via outpatient services for weeks after.

reSTART cofounder Cosette Rae opened the center with therapist Hilarie Cash almost two decades ago. Rae had previously worked as a tech developer and, upon realizing she was overusing technology in unhealthy ways, decided to change careers and pursue social worker training.

She vividly recalls a case in 2009, when she was called to assist a young adult who refused to leave their house or go to school. (Rae uses the pronoun “they” here to protect the individual’s identity.) They were not healthy, and had moved their bedroom mattress into the middle of the living room to play World of Warcraft nonstop. Doctors had diagnosed the person with agoraphobia, but Rae suspected that tech addiction was the real problem. She reached out to Cash for advice, and the two realized there was no place to treat people with these types of issues. They decided to open a center themselves.

Rae remembers being both “revered and rejected” in the early days of the center. Much like today, many didn’t think tech addiction was real. But there was no shortage of clients: She has treated around a thousand in the nearly two decades since the center opened, and spoken to many thousands more, she says.

What her clients struggle with is more difficult than breaking free from substance abuse, Rae says, partly because there’s no getting away from tech; it’s everywhere. “When I go out in the community right now, I do not have a lot of friends that are telling me about meth or heroin,” she says. “I don’t usually go into the store and see people dealing. I don’t go to the restaurant and people are doing a line. But when it comes to technology, it’s everywhere. So you’re constantly being in front of it and having to say no.”

It’s more akin to an eating disorder, Rae says, where a person still has to eat but has a problematic relationship with food. In this day and age, clients aren’t able to drop technology from their lives completely.

It’s not just teenagers who are struggling. Rae mainly works with young and middle-age adults (reSTART takes clients who are 15 and older), but she has seen clients in their late forties or fifties. The most common addictions Rae sees, besides video games, involve virtual reality, pornography, and more recently, AI chatbots.

One client, a 23-year-old Seattle-area college student who asks to withhold their name and gender, describes their own overuse of video games, YouTube, and communication platform Discord. The student says they wished schools today would teach kids how to use technology mindfully and warn against addictive behaviors: “Technology is best used when it’s a tool to enhance your life. But what I got trapped in is technology being my life.”

The dopamine debate: What brain science says about “tech addiction”

Some scientists, such as Stanford psychiatrist and Dopamine Nation author Anna Lembke, say compulsive tech use taps into the brain’s reward circuitry in strikingly similar ways to substance addiction. When someone scrolls social media or wins a round of a video game, their brain releases dopamine, which trains them to seek that “hit” again and again. Repeated bursts of stimulation can desensitize the pathways and weaken the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and self-control, making it harder to resist urges even when the habits are causing problems or affecting school, work, or relationships.

Brain imaging studies of people with internet gaming or social media disorders have found structural and functional changes in these regions that mirror what doctors see in other behavioral addictions such as gambling.

Tech addiction is not listed as a condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the guide published by the American Psychiatric Association for diagnosing mental health conditions. However, in its most recent edition, the DSM does list “internet gaming disorder” as a condition warranting more clinical study.

Its absence doesn’t faze Rae. “It took 40 years for gambling [disorder] to get into DSM,” she says. “So I don’t give any credence to the fact that it’s not in there yet.”

The science is far from settled, and some studies suggest that tech doesn’t cause users’ unhappiness. A 2023 University of Oxford study of 2 million people from around the globe found that links between internet adoption and psychological well-being were “small and inconsistent.”

And in March, California Institute of Technology researcher Ian Anderson and Wendy Wood, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that calling habitual tech use “addiction” was misleading and harmful. In surveys, they found that when people described their Instagram use as an addiction, “They felt stuck, less confident that they had the ability to change.” Yes, they wrote, companies should “amend their platforms to help users regain control over their habits.” But they concluded, “The truth is: Heavy use is not necessarily an addiction.”

Nir Eyal, a tech investor and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, says it’s not the tech that’s solely to blame for people’s addictions. “Every generation has a moral panic about whatever new technology, but you don’t fix things by stopping their use,” he says. “You fix things by making them better, by making them safer.”

Eyal argues that there is nothing unethical about making a product that some people get addicted to, and asking social media companies to make their products less sticky is not the answer. Why? “Because any product that’s good, somebody is going to get addicted to,” he says. “Stop making the product interesting? That’s dumb. That’s why we use the product. That’s called ‘entertaining and engaging.’”

The debate is only likely to grow more urgent given the rapid adoption, and daunting potency, of AI. Rae fears AI could create new ways for people to get hooked on tech, or treat AI as a “substitute attachment figure” for real relationships. “I think everybody’s been focused on all the talk around the existential threats like, ‘Can it take our jobs?’” Rae says. “But what about taking our humanity? That’s what’s happening.” As a practitioner working with tech addicts, she says, “I’m standing here looking down at a tsunami coming to people who have no idea what their kids are going to be facing. How this is going to change them; how it’s going to change their relationships with each other; and how it’s going to change their futures.”

Can laws, product changes, and rehab clinics actually protect kids from addictive tech?

If tech addiction is accepted as real, it raises another thorny and divisive question: What can—and should—be done about it? Some states, including New York and California, have enacted laws requiring warning labels on social media apps that highlight the risks for young people. In September, the New York attorney general proposed a rule requiring social media companies to restrict algorithmically personalized feeds and nighttime notifications for users under 18 unless parental consent is granted. California put legislation into place last year creating safety restrictions on the development of AI.

Federal oversight has been slow or nonexistent, though many legislators have tried. In 2019, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill that would have banned social media features that exploited human psychology. Hawley’s Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act went nowhere, attracting little bipartisan support and never making it out of committee.

In December, Australia became the first country to ban social media for people under 16, and Greece and Britain are considering similar laws.

Social media platforms have themselves put up some guardrails, mainly via opt-in or parental controls. Meta launched Teen Accounts on Instagram and Facebook, with more restrictive features and nighttime nudges to close the app. Snap has expanded in-app warnings, “friending” safeguards, and location-sharing controls. Google and YouTube announced a $20 million initiative to address teen digital well-being. TikTok launched a daily screen-time limit, with users under 18 automatically cut off after an hour. And in February, Meta, TikTok, and Snap agreed to be independently rated on how well they protect teens’ mental health by a group of advocacy organizations.

reSTART’s Rae doesn’t want to get stuck in semantics. Instead of arguing about whether their products are addictive, she says that Big Tech companies should devote some of their profits to resources that can help those “struggling as a result of loving their product,” she says. Many people can’t afford treatment like reSTART, as most health insurers won’t cover problematic tech use—though sometimes clients can get coverage for associated disorders such as depression or anxiety.

Companies could also consider shutting off access to their technology for certain time frames, Rae suggests. Eyal recommends something similar. In addition to implementing a legal minimum age to use social media, he recommends that tech companies adopt a “use and abuse” policy. After a certain number of hours, he says, tech companies should reach out to the user with a message offering resources to prevent or cure addiction.

Sarah Hill recently transitioned out of the center to an apartment owned by reSTART, half an hour away. She still visits the center most days for treatment, but is eyeing a job at a grocery store on her off days—and even got a cell phone. It’s a basic “dumb” Gabb phone, with no apps or games. Even so, Hill recently found herself mindlessly scrolling through new screen backgrounds. “I felt myself losing control again, and it scared me,” she says, tucking the phone underneath her legs on one of reSTART’s oversize chairs.

But Hill says she does have high hopes about managing her addiction in the future and says her phone usage has improved. “After making so many mistakes, I’m finally putting a foot down and saying, ‘I want to get out of this endless cycle,’” she says. “I need to do something to better myself and my life.”

Six questions to ask yourself about your tech use

Washington’s reSTART Clinic developed these screening questions to help potential clients consider whether their tech use has become problematic. Here’s an abbreviated version:

• How often do you think about your current, previous, or next online activity?
• Have you become restless, irritable, angry, or anxious when you are unable to engage in online activities?
• Have you tried to reduce participation in online activities but found it too difficult?
• Have you lost interest in non-online activities such as sports, hobbies, or family time?
• Have you deceived a family member, significant other, employer, or therapist regarding the amount of time you spend online?
• Have you jeopardized or lost a significant relationship or an academic or employment opportunity because of your engagement with online activities?

This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “What is tech addiction? It may well be Big Tech’s next problem.” It was updated on March 26, 2026 following the verdict in the case against Meta and YouTube.

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Mark Zuckerberg is nothing if not a true believer. Again and again, the Meta CEO and Facebook founder has thrown himself headfirst into his company’s top initiatives. A few years ago, he made himself the face of the company’s since-sidelined metaverse push, and remained steadfast even as the internet mocked how his virtual reality avatar fenced, hydrofoiled, and, at times, looked awkwardly flat. He even ran internal and media meetings inside Meta’s own VR offices, which he argued was a better way to connect than regular video conference calls. He also regularly wears Meta’s bulky AI smart glasses in public, aesthetics be damned. 

The chief executive is now walking the walk on another Meta imperative: AI adoption. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg is building an AI agent to help him as CEO. Details are scarce on the still-in-development tool, but the WSJ reports that it’s getting Zuckerberg information faster, expediting processes that normally require him to query multiple people. Meta did not immediately return a request for comment on the tool. 

As Meta spends tens of billions of dollars developing “superintelligent” AI models and building data centers to power them, it’s become borderline obsessed with staff-wide AI adoption. The company has encouraged employees to employ the technology in multiple ways, and incorporated “AI-driven impact” into its performance reviews. It is also reportedly among the tech giants that have established leaderboards that rank employees based on their consumption of tokens—a measure of AI use. But of all the methods of inducing AI adoption, Zuckerberg’s leading by example might be the most effective. 

Data shows an emerging credibility gap in which leaders are mandating and hyping AI but are often only casual users of the technology themselves—sometimes using it less than their rank-and-file employees. Nearly 70% of CEOs, CFOs, and senior executives use AI at work less than an hour a week, including 28% who don’t use it at all, according to a survey of more than 6,000 senior leaders in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia co‑authored by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom. The disconnect may be blinding leaders to the first-hand experience of using AI, which is causing workload creep and cognitive overload, at least in current use cases.

Separate research from Gallup finds that manager support of AI—including modeling its application—is a strong driver of whether employees use and value AI tools. In organizations investing in AI, employees who strongly agree their manager actively supports their team’s use of AI are more than twice as likely to use AI a few times a week or more, 6.5 times as likely to strongly agree the tools are useful, and 8.8 times as likely to say AI helps them do what they do best every day, Gallup says.

By all accounts, Meta’s AI organization-wide AI push seems to be working. It’s breeding an experimental culture reminiscent of Facebook’s heady early years, the WSJ reports, with employees participating in AI hackathons and deploying personal AI agents that do work on their behalf.

Does every CEO need a Zuckerberg-style AI sidekick? That remains to be seen. What is clear is that leaders who expect AI to be woven into daily workflows can’t stay light users of the tools; if they want credibility—and real adoption—they’ll have to log in and experiment. They’ll need to feel the pain and reap the gains, along with everyone else.

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United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is preparing for the worst: a future where oil prices reach as high as $175 per barrel and stay above $100 until the end of 2027. 

With the U.S.-Israel war on Iran now in its fourth week, the airline industry is staring down its biggest disruption since the pandemic as the global oil market suffers a supply shock.

This is the first major crisis the industry is facing since widely ending the practice of fuel hedging in 2024 and 2025, an insurance that can protect airlines from spikes in fuel costs. 

Jet fuel—which accounts for more than 40% of airlines’ operating costs—have nearly doubled in the last three weeks, according to Argus Media. Kirby predicted in a letter to employees that if fuel prices remain high, they would add $11 billion to United’s annual costs.

It may spell doomsday for an industry that took four years to recover from the pandemic, but airline executives are remaining optimistic. The reason? This time, they’re prepared to pass on the costs to you. 

The average price of a transcontinental flight has risen from $167 in late February to $414 in mid-March, according to a Deutsche Bank analysis. The strain is also being felt strongly on less-distant routes. A flight from New York to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on budget airline JetBlue went from $166 to $566 in three weeks and is more than four times as expensive as it was a year earlier. 

But demand remains strong as consumers have already swallowed a post-pandemic spike in airfares. The last 10 weeks have been the highest booked revenue weeks in United’s history, according to Kirby’s letter.

Similarly, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that sales in the week before March 17 rose about 25% from a year prior. Five of Delta’s top 10 ticket sales days ever have happened since the war began. And he’s not too worried about fuel prices because Delta is in a “position of strength” to raise airfare, Business Insider reported. Delta also has its own oil refinery, which provides a “meaningful hedge,” he said.

To be sure, cancellations are coming, and routes will be slowed or ended like they were during the pandemic, said Martin Dresner, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Maryland. 

Delta has halted certain routes, including flights from New York to Tel Aviv until May 31 and from Tel Aviv to New York until June 1. The restart of its Atlanta to ​Tel Aviv service has been delayed, with flights to Tel Aviv paused until August 4 and from Tel Aviv until August 5.

United is planning to trim some off-peak flights, such as redeyes as well as Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday trips during the second and third quarters. The airline is also halting service to Tel Aviv and Dubai due to the war. 

“To be clear, nothing changes about our longer-term plans for aircraft deliveries or total capacity for 2027 and beyond, but there’s no point in burning cash in the near term on flying that just can’t absorb these fuel costs,” Kirby said in the letter to staff. 

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