They’re a biased source since their bonuses depend on those layoffs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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
I was in a meeting at a credit card company about 2 decades ago where a VP said exactly that - without the AI part.
The AI won’t replace labor, automation/robotics will do that. AI will provide the brain to operate the automation properly. We’ve had the automation for a long time, the AI is making the difference.
They are working very hard on the intersection of AI and Automation to replace human labor.
Option 2, please: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
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.
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The far more likely scenario. Mass unemployment leads to civil unrest, quelled through violence.
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Correction: 99% of CEOs are planning to use AI as an excuse to layoff employees to juice quarterly profits. They have zero accountability and golden parachutes, so no skin off of their asses.
Rank and yank, at any excuse. It’s terrible for morale, so blame it on something “beyond our control” … “remaining competitive in the current market” or whatever.
And the stock price bumps from layoffs mean they effectively get to just hand themselves huge raises.
Then parachute and let some other schmuck deal with the fallout
These days it feels more like “then parachute and let a venture capitalist firm buy up the mess, so they can pawn it off to the nearest would-be monopolist”
Pretty much.
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.
Can we lay off the CEO first? He’s pretty useless.
Yes.
The company I work for has decided to change their TLD from .net to .ai to much eye rolling from the staff.
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.
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.
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?
always indian, or south american, or easter european techworkers who can be paid less.
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.
“Expect”. As though it’s entirely out of their hands.
In my view it is. It’s a race to the bottom. What is a company going to do when they are in a competition with other firms that have less staff but the same output (i.e., a much lower cost base)? The options are either to go out of business or to restructure to the market reality. This is a problem that needs to be solved at the government level.
“The same output” lol.
That might be the case if AI were actually as competent as humans and actually cheaper. AI may be faster, but they aren’t going to get any cheaper, and LLMs won’t get much more “competent” than they are now.
AI is getting cheaper every year and the output is becoming better. Look at token prices. The so called frontier models are not that far ahead of the open source models that you or I can run essentially for free, either.
The reality is that you can sit down and automate significant tasks with AI in an afternoon, today. I work in an industry where a significant amount of time is spent auditing and QAing output. A properly trained skill for Claude is able to do the same QA task to 90% of my (senior) level in 2% of the time. Similarly, it is able to coach the junior staff to produce work that is a much higher level than would be otherwise expected of them, reducing the actual audit length on that side too.
I am hugely positive for the future of AI. I am hugely negative about what it means for people.
Replace C-suite executives with AI before the layoffs, then transition to a Co-Op. ✊🏼
99% of CEOs
ExpectLooking forward to AI-Driven Layoffs in the Next Two YearsI find it weird how so many companies are targeting for layoffs instead of expanding the company. You get an accelerator…
Most corporations are near-term driven, not long term. It’s why many don’t innovate anything anymore. Quarterly profits matter more than anything
Tariffa and Hormuz makes things expensive. People buy less so companies sell less. Layoffs everywhere.
Companies are competing for the same market share.
As an example, what are you going to do with four times more accountants than the total market needs? There are only a limited number of companies to do the accounts for. If one accountant can do four times the work as before, he might be able to expand. If every accountant can do four times the work as before, they cannot all expand. On a company level, why would you keep all the staff doing only 25% of the work as before? Their labour has been significantly reduced in value.
have you seen what thier current mission, agenda is, almost every tech conference near me is AI specific. theres almost no other form of tech at these conference but some form AI bs they are pushing.(i work near a conference center)
There’s nowhere to expand to.
