- cross-posted to:
- workreform@lemmy.world
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- workreform@lemmy.world
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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That’s okay. I will choose not to participate in your new economy beyond buying essentials like food.
99% of CEOs
ExpectLooking forward to AI-Driven Layoffs in the Next Two Years“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.
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.
“The same output” lol.
They expect layoffs. They’re just going to blame AI for it.
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.
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:
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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. Existing UAV technology and future advances in military robotics and AI make it alarmingly easy to kill en masse. The poor, the unemployed, the sick and everybody else disenfranchised by the AI revolution and the corporate takeover of the world is culled in a genocide that would make the Holocaust look insignificant.
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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.
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?
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 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
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…
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.
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.
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.
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!
Well good news then, 99% of the population is going to force these 1% CEOs to be …laid off…
Replace C-suite executives with AI before the layoffs, then transition to a Co-Op. ✊🏼
I ask again to consider that AI does not have to replace human labour to lead to layoffs. All it has to do is help existing labour to produce more in the same amount of time. In an economy that doesn’t suddenly want to buy more product than it previously did, that means letting go of the people whose labour is no longer needed to produce the same amount product it previously had. Whether or not corpos are using AI as cover for layoffs, if today’s AI increases productivity, it very likely will lead to layoffs. And there are signs that it does indeed increase productivity in some tasks in certain sectors.
Would you look at that. They kept pushing layoff all the time for fake reasons to increase immediate profit, and now they’ll have another fake reason to do mass layoffs for maximum immediate profit.
What? AI? Who cares about that at this point. It’s like a pretty ribbon on a big gift box to shareholders.
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.
https://isaiprofitable.com/ is a good site to see how profitable AI is at this moment…
That really shows who profits from all of this and i can only hope that company would implode
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 someone 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?
Not just that - it confuses several financial terms.
CAPEX is one time spend. Revenue is recurring. Take Microsoft, as just one example: They are stuffed with cash abroad - they only bring it home when there’s a moratorium; until then it just sits and waits. It’s much cheaper for Microsoft to spend it outside the US than to take it home - CAPEX that can happen outside the US is often welcomed by the big stock companies as it puts the money to work.
Revenue happens every year. It’s like saying “is this banana stand profitable?” and then answering by saying “well the shed cost 10 dollars and the bananas sell for 5c”. You need more information to understand whether those are good or bad numbers.
And I know - there’s always money in the banana stand!
Haha i dont know
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.
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.
Automation of what ?
shareholder value
Can we lay off the CEO first? He’s pretty useless.
Yes.
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.
