And last year they were all saying some variation on “don’t worry, AI is not going to cost anyone their jobs.”
Key take away for anyone is to never trust what an executive is saying. Much like a politician, if their lips are moving they are probably lying.
So… CEOs will cause job cuts in 2024, and have decided to use generative AI as an excuse.
Reminder: the problem is 100% capitalism, 0% technology. We’ve built a truly perverse economic system in which eliminating labor hurts people.
Who’s we? In the country I grew up in, you’d get two years of unemployment benefits (90% of your previous salary), free education and free student support of $1000/month while retraining. This country runs with a surplus and one of the lowest levels of foreign debt and, no, it’s not a financial haven/tax shelter.
It’s about how we structure society - let no one tell you otherwise, capitalism or not.
What country do you live in?
I live in the UK now which is a modern feudal state and more or less a failed state. I grew up in Denmark though, which was the country I was referring to.
I have to say this, if you think UK is a modern feudal and a failed state then ya ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
Oh I’m aware that there’s a long way to go still before rock bottom. Having lived here for 23 years, it’s only gone one direction unfortunately.
No lies detected.
If you dont mind sharing, why did you end up moving to the UK?
I wanted to work in games and there was neither the degree nor the employment at the time (nowadays Copenhagen is doing quite well for the games industry). So went to study in the U.K., found a job there, met my (English) wife and had kids here. We keep dreaming about moving to Denmark, but with four kids there’s a lot of schooling to align. Maybe later.
It hurst people not rich enough to be in the 1% or above. The 1% or above will benefit from it in the short term. In the long term it is going to hurt them as fewer and fewer people will be able to buy their products and services. At least for this quarter it’ll look dynamite.
Capitalism is going to eat itself.
We have Jack Welch to thank for this trend. It wasn’t always that way.
Or Henry Ford. Heck choose anyone in the Industrial revolution. Thats when this started truly kicking off.
Well, it was Jack Welch who started the braindead “line goes up” trend of making their share price raise by any means, usually layoffs. Before him, people still had jobs for life and were somwhat looked after by their employers. Behind the bastards podcast did a good episode on him.
- CEO wastes a ton of money on generative AI
- CEO fires a bunch of people to hit quarterly profit targets
generative AI resulted in job cuts.
Yeah, what’s unfortunate about CEO predictions is that they can kind of just will their expected result into being by acting on it whether it’s sound or not.
Still, I think it’s well past time we started preparing for high surplus labor. We’re already in the early stages of post scarcity, and if we don’t embrace something like socialism, we’re getting more dystopia.
I have absofuckinglutley no faith whatsoever in our society to do the right thing in this respect. We value ownership waytoofuckingmuch when it comes to businesses, were never going to get past the argument of “I put forward the capital for this business, I am entitled to all of the profits. Who cares that there is no work for you? No work no pay.”
I forsee a gigantic increase in homelessness and politicians will use that as an excuse to further cut any social spending as they’ll pin all our issues on “communist policies.” :(
Are you familiar with the term “capitalist realism”?
Not in that term, but as a concept. I do know it now though so thanks!
I wonder how well an AI would be able to do a CEO’s job? Why not start with the most expensive employee?
I’m pretty sure I could train an AI to make racist jokes at a board meeting. That’s halfway there already.
There will be cuts, we just haven’t decided why yet…
I agree with their outlook.
Can we include CEOs as those positions laid off? They don’t do fuck all but save the company money, that can be done by an Excel spreadsheet.
Can we start with the CEOs? Pretty sure shatGPT can do their jobs easily
I mean we saw this in 2023. Companies fired people and replaced them with AI that was unable to do the job.
Reminds me of the John Deere strike, where the back-office folks were told they needed to fill in for the machinists and truckers.
People literally do not understand what a LLM does, how it is useful, or why it would be employed. Its like firing your hospital staff and filling every room with an MRI machine, a stethoscope, and a sign that reads “You figure it out”.
The findings, based on interviews with 4,702 company chiefs spread across 105 countries, point to the far-reaching impacts that AI models are expected to have on economies and societies, a topic that will feature prominently at the annual meetings.
Once you start digging into the article it is quite hysterical what executives think a predictive chat model are going to replace. It reads more like a wish list then anything else.
But they expect AI to replace transportation, Tesla and General Motors are not having any success with this… yet. There appears to be a bandwidth issue that isn’t going to be solved until the US upgrades to fiber.
Boston dynamics are having a lot of success with their robots of late. Everyone else is stuck still getting robots to stack boxes. Which is also having it’s problems with bandwidth. And apparently logic issues.
They also expect things like Energy and power/utilities to be replaced by AI. And that is just dumb. Automation has already swept through the power sector, and AI is not going to help with much else, unless it is going to start repairing power lines, transformers, or the regular substation.
Above all, this is not taking into account the new jobs this also creates. People will need to repair and troubleshoot equipment at multiple layers.
What is also absent from the article is the executive jobs AI will also replace. Once AI can view things at multiple levels. True, you don’t need the average worker anymore. But you don’t need someone that is just collecting a paycheck, do you? If AI will be programed to replace redundancies, then it won’t only find those at lower levels.
Developers: I could use AI to increase my output and productivity while better testing code and coming up with unique ways to speed up runtimes!
CEO: We could do the same output with less people!
Shareholders: we can have the same profit without a CEO!
I’m actually okay with this if it results in fewer duties with the same number of jobs.
There’s an awful lot of stuff in my job that is just tedious busy work. No human ever reads the reports I write, so they might as well not even be written by human either.
You’ll get more work, lower pay and you’ll be fucking grateful!
Looks like consulting jobs are going to be well in demand dealing with this type of bullshit from management everywhere.
I am here with my popcorn to see how well this will play for those CEOs.
We are in an age in which getting to a power position is a reality show. You don’t need to know how to do anything, really. It’s enough that you have charisma and trigger emotions (possibly negative emotions, they work better)
In theory because of AI in the future the only people will be worth a damn will be people with actually original ideas. They’ll tell the AI what to do and then the AI will run the business.
I wish that bar chart was broken down by job type, not industry. I’d wager that a lot of these jobs are the same jobs across all of those industries. Example: customer service, copy writing, etc.
The current AI generation tools, are tools and are still unable to replace people, simply because AI’s do not know all the requirements, do not have the over-all overview, it still makes mistakes (even if you think the code is good or even working), it’s not very creative. AI needs constant instructions as well… So in general I’m not afraid at all of these current AIs. It’s just a tool… like an editor or stackoverflow for support Q&A.
All of those limitations you describe on AI also apply to a lot of humans.
As if AI is trying to replicate the humans behavior. Then again, I still see GenAI as a tool and not as a replacement for humans. Until at some singularity point in time maybe…
I do believe some jobs might disappear, which are jobs nobody really wanted anyway (sorry). But at the same time, new jobs will arise with new technology just like with the the computer, internet, smartphones, etc…
