I know a little about charity and compassion. I’ve had the privilege over the last 15 years of leading a nonprofit private sector organization that specializes in helping communities and businesses cope with natural disasters and crises caused by humans. 

The global humanitarian system and virtually every nongovernmental organization and United Nations entity are facing hard times and funding shortages. The shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development has closed hundreds of aid groups and slashed funding for programs that fed the hungry and provided help during disasters. According to OXFAM, healthcare services will be unavailable for up to 95 million people and some 23 million children will lose access to education. 

A quarter of a billion people need aid, reports Tom Fletcher, head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs at the United Nations. But funding has dropped to $12 billion, the lowest in a decade. Only 20% of UN appeals for contributions are supported, he says. Our own organization, the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundation, lost $1.5 million this year in programs aimed at beefing up preparedness in the Philippines’ Office of Civil Defense and various local governments. As a result, staffing and funding at various UN agencies working in disaster response and economic development were cut by 20 to 50 percent. Other agencies, focused on health and human rights, suffered 100 percent cuts. 

Only one in every three Americans feels compassion toward marginalized groups, with 61% of those surveyed saying empathy has decreased over the last four years. So found the 2025 Compassion Report from the Muhammad Ali Center. Empathy levels diminished 14% across the United States after the pandemic, with the steepest drop among millennials, according to a 2022 survey of 1,000-plus Americans by United Way of the National Capital Area. 

Nor does this phenomenon of empathy burnout appear to be entirely new. A 2010 meta-analysis led by a University of Michigan researcher reported that over a 30-year period, empathy levels among American university students had plummeted 48%. The study attributed the generational decrease in empathy to a rise in narcissism, xenophobia, racism and misogyny. 

The current occupant of the White House embodies this disturbing trend. His influence over other world leaders compounds the problem, with crackdowns on undocumented “aliens” now a contagion across Europe and elsewhere. 

Still, a counter trend is happening in, of all places, the private sector. Social investors and even social investment funds have increased in both number and size. These groups are prepared to make less in profit if their money is used for “good” causes – providing clean water, housing disaster victims. For example, the Connecting Business Initiative, launched at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in 2016 to focus on helping out in disasters, has grown into a network of 22 business groups.  The latest figures report that it has lent a hand in 213 crises, helped more than 6 million people and generated $144 million in aid. 

When I was growing up in Manila, one of my boyhood heroes was Bobby Kennedy. His words inspired in me an idealism and an ambition to help people that persist to this day. It is his voice I often hear now. 

“Poverty is indecent, Illiteracy is indecent,” he once said. “We cannot afford to forget that the real constructive force in this world comes not from tanks or bombs but from the imaginative ideas, the warm sympathies and the generous spirit of a people.” 

“What we need in the United States,” he said soon after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, was neither division nor hatred nor violence nor lawlessness, but, rather, “love and wisdom and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer.”  

How do we cultivate compassion? Political and religious leaders can inspire and appeal to our better instincts. Community engagement initiatives such as Beyond Us & Them can foster social connection and build resilient communities. Schools can heighten awareness of the problem and integrate empathy in the curriculum. The Jesuits have an immersion program where high school students spend days living with poor people. Canada has a Roots of Empathy initiative that brings infants into the classroom where students can engage with them. Values are learned when we are young. Parents and even the movies and sports play a role in developing who we are as people. 

By using these channels and strategies, we can work together to fight against a decline in empathy and carve out a future characterized by understanding and compassion. 

Empathy gives meaning to our lives. It’s part of what makes us human. We can’t afford to let it die. 

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.

But recently Goldman Sachs’ analysts have picked up on a new twist. 

“Linking recent layoff announcements to public companies’ earnings reports and stock market data, we find that the recent increase in layoff announcements came mainly from companies that attributed their layoffs to benign factors, such as restructuring driven by automation and technological advancements.” But instead of going up, these stocks fell by an average of 2%. And companies that cited restructurings were punished even more harshly. As the analysts wrote, “This suggests that, despite the benign justifications offered, the equity market has perceived recent layoff announcements as a negative signal about these companies’ prospects.”

This will be a pattern to continue watching, as Goldman predicts a “potential rise” in layoffs given commentary they’ve been hearing during earnings season, which they say is “motivated in part by a desire to use AI to reduce labor costs.”

So why have investors changed their tune on restructuring-driven layoffs?

The most obvious reason, Goldman’s analysts assert, is that they simply don’t believe what companies are saying. The analysts found that companies that have announced layoffs recently have “experienced higher capex, debt, and interest expense growth and lower profit growth than comparable companies within the same industries this year.” Meaning those staff cuts “might have actually been driven by more concerning reasons like the need to reduce costs to offset rising interest expense and declining profitability.”

It’s an interesting development, particularly in light of the fact that bragging about layoffs and boasting about the percentage of work now done by AI has become something of a trend the past few months, a flex to show that that CEOs—particularly in tech—were 100% in on AI. 

As Geoff Colvin wrote in Fortune, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Target COO Michael Fiddelke (becoming CEO in February) and JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum are just a few of the execs who have talked candidly about how AI-driven efficiency gains may limit the number of people they’ll need going forward. As Colvin wrote, the language more executives are using to communicate such messages “isn’t defensive or apologetic. Just the opposite—it’s direct and confident. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, having fewer employees is becoming a badge of honor.”

And while AI efficiency narratives certainly aren’t going out of style anytime soon, they can go too far, as Fortune’s Sharon Goldman recently reported. As she wrote, “In May, just months after touting AI’s ability to replace human workers, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski reversed an AI-driven hiring freeze and announced the company is adding more human staff. He told Bloomberg that Klarna is now hiring to ensure customers always have the option to speak with a real person. ‘From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want,’ he said.”

Ten years ago, programming meant typing code into a blank word processor and editing it manually. But with the advent of generative AI, this type of programming is quickly becoming a thing of the past, he explained.

“More and more, you can take a step back from the code, and you can ask an AI to go do end-to-end tasks for you,” Truell said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference earlier this month. 

Yet programmers may not want to step back too far, he added, pointing out that there’s levels to AI-assisted coding. 

The oft-repeated term “vibe coding” may seem to encapsulate all AI coding assistants. In reality, it suggests amateur builders or inexperienced AI users trying to bring an idea to life without necessarily looking under the hood.

“Vibe coding refers to a method of coding with AI where you kind of close your eyes and you don’t look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you,” he said.

Truell likened it to building a house by putting up four walls and a roof without knowing what’s going on under the floorboards or with the wiring.

This coding method may be perfect for AI users looking to quickly mock up a game or website, but when it comes to more advanced programming, things have the potential to go wrong, he warned.

“If you close your eyes and you don’t look at the code and you have AIs build things with shaky foundations as you add another floor, and another floor, and another floor, and another floor, things start to kind of crumble,” he said. 

With Cursor, by contrast, programmers can embed AI directly into the integrated development environment where programmers write their code. By using the context of the existing code, or even an entire code base, it can often predict the next line. The tool includes everything from multi-line-autocomplete to full function generation. It can also help a programmer debug their code and explain errors.

Despite being only 25 years old, Truell’s take on AI coding carries real weight. He and three other graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created what would become Cursor as a project in 2022.

Since then, Cursor has become one of the most popular coding assistants out there, with a reported 1 million daily users as of earlier this year, Bloomberg reported. Since it launched, the company has reached $1 billion in annualized revenue and amassed 300 employees, according to CNBC.

Cursor received its first $8 million investment from OpenAI’s Startup Fund in 2023. It later raised more millions from some of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen Horowitz. Fast forward to 2025, and the company has closed on a $2.3 billion funding round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation.

While vibe coders may be flying blind, Truell said the Cursor coding assistant is the best of both worlds, helping its expert customers get into the nitty gritty details of their code.

“But then in the places where you want to take a step back and you want to ask the AI to do something end-to-end you can do that too,” he said.