They expect layoffs. They’re just going to blame AI for it.
Exactly this… Even ones actually attributed to AI will likely be an overreach that won’t be realized until after a person’s life has been totally upended… Shit’s gonna be bleak
Bingpot!
This is too dismissive.
Industrialization and automation has already eliminated an entire class of work that was otherwise there.
In a hunter gathered society or an early industrial society there was always work for everyone, in modern capitalist society, there quite frankly isn’t, and that leads to huge numbers of people just being cast aside.
And AI may wipe out a huge number of the rest. I genuinely can’t possibly fathom how it will do anything but exacerbate every single one of society’s problems.
LLMs are not and will never be good enough to replace human labor. Augment it, sure, and that could lead to fewer jobs but that’s not generally what happens. They are, however, good enough for execs to think they can replace human labor.
They don’t have to be as good to replace us.
It even can be a feature if AI isn’t as good as the people they are replacing. For example, in the case of call centers/help lines, it might be more desirable to have a shitty system to discourage callers yet have plausible deniability…
I find I’m referencing Cory Doctorow a lot lately…
I was in a meeting at a credit card company about 2 decades ago where a VP said exactly that - without the AI part.
I had a funny “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” moment the other day… when reflecting that LLMs mean I don’t learn the details of Rust, or Python, or Perl, or VLC plugins, or systemd service configuration files, or anything like that anymore - I just learn how to work with the LLM to ensure that we are getting the results we need from the tech of the moment.
It reminded me of the stasis - clone - transfer doctors in Down and Out, anything complicated they just reach for the “ultimate solution to everything” rather than trying to be good at all the specialty surgeries and other skills that old fashioned doctors used to study.
The issue is that those bots are worse in completely unpredictable ways. Like when some airline passengers were given incorrect information which led to the airline being sued and having to pay the made up offer as well as damages & tribunal fees. The bots might be unhelpful, but to the disservice of the company’s financials
The AI doesn’t need to be better than the professional it’s replacing, it just needs to be more cost effective than the barely capable outsourced worker the jobs was going to be given anyway.
Not really, because when an employee fails their task it’s the employee’s responsibility, and if it’s catastrophic enough it can lead to firings or lawsuits. But as soon as it’s a chatbot, the liability fully rests on the company. How long will insurance protect those companies too?
It has been 20 years since this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourced_(film)
Yeah, we’ve got an Indian branch of my local office, but my local office still has more employees than it did when I joined 12 years ago, and they were growing rather quickly at that time.
A nail gun won’t replace roofers, but it does mean you need less of them.
A mail truck doesn’t replace the postman, but compared to the walking postman - the truck enables fewer mailmen to deliver more mail.
A C++ compiler doesn’t replace the programmer, but it does enable one programmer to do the work of 10 assembly code programmers.
LLMs are going to be another “force multiplier” tool, in certain fields - when used correctly which not everybody will do.
There is a question of timeline. Maybe in 10+ years, but not 2.
The early wave of layoffs in the sector “due to AI” were at the same time as the interest rate went up, pushing all tech companies to start focusing on profit. A lot of unprofitable divisions were cut because it stopped making financial sense to invest in products that didn’t have day 1 revenue.
You’re now seeing companies doing layoffs and claiming AI to either hide that development in their companies have stalled or they are taking advantage of their new shiny remote work platforms to push wages down by shifting workers to places with lower cost of living.
AI labor isn’t worth its tokens, even when they are heavily discounted to gain market share. It might be in a decade, but not now.
I keep seeing these comments where AI is hailed as the next industrial revolution, but I think they all miss the point.
Industrialization created jobs. There were fewer skilled jobs lost than new skilled jobs created. It then created the need for more knowledge based jobs, like civil engineers.
The AI lobby is doing the opposite. It targets higher paid skilled jobs. If they were to succeed, they would give birth to the opposite of the Industrial Revolution.
The industrial revolution created loads of new jobs in manufacturing, logistics, distribution, procurement and transport.
The digital revolution created loads of IT, cybersecurity and programming jobs.
AI removes most if not all the human labour from the equation if it functions properly. What new jobs has the AI revolution created or will create? Because last I checked, “prompt engineer” is not a job title. I can’t even find any fucking jobs for it anywhere from a LinkedIn search.
(sigh)
I’d prefer tech-bros pushing crypto, Web3 and NFTs to something that can actually cause mass unemployment and societal collapse.
And AI may wipe out a huge number of the rest. I genuinely can’t possibly fathom how it will do anything but exacerbate every single one of society’s problems.
I can see things going one of two ways:
-
Society gets its shit together, uses AI, robotics and sweeping economic reforms to build new infrastructure and create an abundance of resources. Housing shortages, hunger, thirst and famine become a thing of the past, we move towards a post-scarcity utopia.
-
The far more likely scenario. Mass unemployment leads to civil unrest, quelled through violence.
-
You know, a year ago people in charge were all, like nooo we’re not going to fire people and pocket the payroll savings
When did we cross the line where everybody stopped lying? I mean, our vaunted business leaders dropping the bullshit is welcome, even if its bad news… but the interesting bit is in the collective, unconscious decision to just own up to this as the likeliest future.
The Trump admin has emboldened the entire upper echelons of society to drop pretense because enough of society is stupid enough to always buy it even if its painfully obvious that they are lying. They feel untouchable with their buddies in charge.
Exactly - the more easilly the “riff-raff” is to swindle or the less capable they are to push back, the more intensely and shamelessly the “upper” classes take advantage of the rest.
You don’t just see it in the historical trends (such as ever more reduced levels of broad representativeness of elected politicians in for example the US or Britain), you also see it across nations: for example after the 2008 Crash, the wealthy in France (with its tradition of public rebellion) were actually saying they should be taxed MORE, whilst the wealthy in England (whose closest to “public” rebellion ever was the Barons rebelling against the King leading to the Magna Carta) were openly lobbying the Government to be taxed LESS (and got what they asked for, with Britain endind up in Austerity, with the anger caused by it being successfully redirected against Immigrants and The EU, hence Brexit, so the wealthy were totally right in not fearing the “riff-raff”).
PS: that spirit of not provoking the streets of wealthy French did not survive the Macron years, especially once he won against the “Gilet Jaunes” (Yellow Vests).
I guess the office leases weren’t THAT important after all
What I wonder is: how are they going to call in all the AI workers for meetings?
And what doe RTO look like for an LLM?
Clarification - these are management driven layoffs. AI doesn’t drive anything, managers replace people with it.
well, not in the sense of “layoffs because AI can do those jobs”, but still AI-driven in the sense of “AI did most of the actual grunt work of laying off those people”.
If there is a repetitive and predictable activity that can be automated at this point it’s layoffs. Announcements and internal talking points are already clearly LLM-generated.
“Did” is an interesting word. If somebody dug a ditch I wouldn’t say the shovel “did” the grunt work.
I expect 99% of CEOs to get laid off. They are too lazy, expensive and don’t want to work. They have a ridiculous sense of entitlement. Ripe for automation.
When you say CEOs are you thinking of guys who are making millions with staff living on almost nothing?
Someone’s gotta see the benefit of not paying those people. They don’t do anything except take the blame for shareholder decisions.
Can we lay off the CEO first? He’s pretty useless.
Yes.
5% of those layoffs will actually be AI related. The other 95% will be profits related.
100% of those layoffs will be for shareholder short term gain.
This type of reporting is frustrating and I really should get off the internet.
These surveys are done by consultanting companies that have large investment holdings. For example in this report one of the surveys is from Mercer, who has an investment wing that has a AUM (asset under management) 1 of $727 Bn according to their website 2. Would there potentially be any sort of chance someone like Mercer never put out a survey that goes against the bullish market driven by AI speculation? Obviously journalists won’t think about these things anymore because that will effect their click rate.
99% of CEOs
ExpectLooking forward to AI-Driven Layoffs in the Next Two Yearshttps://isaiprofitable.com/ is a good site to see how profitable AI is at this moment…
Including Nvidia in the revenue figure is like asking “Is playing in a casino profitable” and including the revenue of the house in the stats.
I dunno there are some people who have bankrupted multiple casinos.
That must have absolutely ruined them!
Surelly since then nobody ever again trusted their ability to run anything!
but even so, the total including the house is still very negative, here. It would be like… I don’t know, I can’t think of anyone in their right mind who could bankrupt a casino 😜
I can think of someone very much not in their right mind who did…
spend
Was the site built by coke-addled used-car salesmen on their break?
Haha i dont know
That really shows who profits from all of this and i can only hope that company would implode
I think it’s only a matter of time.
Waymo already exists in some parts of the US and is being trialled in Atlanta and London. Miso Robotics already can automate manual work in kitchens and have their bots rolled out in fast food chains like White Castle. Claude is miles ahead of competitors in terms of output quality, and there are probably a lot of AI slop content creators making absolute bank from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Optimus 3 will be released soon and at a predicted price of $30,000 per robot, it could potentially lead to mass layoffs in warehouses. Because remember, robots don’t get tired, don’t need food, don’t need water, don’t need to piss, don’t need to shit, won’t complain about OSHA violations, and don’t need a paycheck. All that matters is work quality and price
According to some accounts, China are apparently even further ahead than the US in terms of AI and robotics, but they’re deliberately holding back their rollout of humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles because they know a wide rollout will lead to mass unemployment and civil unrest.
A big part of the reason AI spend is so expensive is because there’s this huge arms race to throw gargantuan amounts of computing power in the hopes of achieving AGI that way. While I think AGI may be bullshit and unachievable, I think they’ll eventually turn a profit once they stop focusing on throwing trillions at data centres.
When CEOs layouts? We can have 200 workers for their pay which will be “prompt engineers”.
Well good news then, 99% of the population is going to force these 1% CEOs to be …laid off…
Can any ‘ai’ round up billionaires and corporate CEO’s and ‘process’ them through a woodchipper or guillotine?
That’s the only ai company/startup I’m interested in.
Who are they expecting to sell stuff to if everyone is unemployed and fighting over an ever decreasing piece of the pie?
everyone is unemployed and fighting over an ever decreasing piece of
the pie?Roasted CEO
Companies will be just selling stuff to the wealthy. Afaik currently already the top 10% wealthy make up 50% of consumerism related revenue.
That’s (really) a political issue, not a company issue. Each company does exactly what it’s supposed to do: maximize profit for their shareholders. Even if they know it will end in a total disaster, they’ll keep doing that. That’s how the system works. Making sure the system works is the job of the policy makers.
Unfortunately, the policy maker is now in the companies payroll and so helps maximize the shareholders profit, there is no one left to look at the bigger picture and/or long term effects.
That’s okay. I will choose not to participate in your new economy beyond buying essentials like food.
