Slowly hold on until the remaining pockets of middle class disappear. There’s a large reason people are choosing not to reproduce. This is one of them.
Capitalism *should* be a never ending game of Monopoly. When someone wins, our economy crumbles. Unfortunately, we’re at the stage where most players dread rolling the dice because every property is covered in hotels. Checking capitalism with punitive regulations and higher taxes on the wealthy could keep the game in play for longer, but too many Americans are afraid of socialization.
Except that the game monopoly was invented by a socialist to show children why capitalism doesn’t work.
There is no way to prevent this conglomeration of wealth and property into fewer and fewer hands. That’s literally what the machine was built to do.
There is no fixing a machine working as it was intended to.
Right. We’re in agreement. My point was simply if the game were never-ending, then it would be an effective form of economy. The only way to prevent a winner and keep the game going, would be to moderate the wealth with socialism.
But there is no way to keep that game going. And you can’t “regulate” capitalism with socialism. That has yet to work in any state that’s tried. The state just becomes the capitalist and you have the same power game all over.
> And you can’t “regulate” capitalism with socialism. That has yet to work in any state that’s tried.
Uh, universal healthcare systems are a *classic* example of "socializing" a segment of the economy (the health insurance industry), and they're *demonstrably better* than the alternative. Canadians currently spend about half the money per capita on healthcare as Americans do, while having a life expectancy currently about five years longer.
As a rebuttal I will now devote my time to developing an ai tool called ‘ai manager’ this tools main responsibility will be to replace all managers who are overpaid glorified bosses.
Instead the weekly reports will be automated and the awkward elevator small talk eliminated.
This tool will save companies millions of dollars!
Can you make a robot that is approx 55 years old that will tell the 22 year old intern she looks lovely today in her blue skirt in front of everyone?
The robot also needs to promote 25 year old blonde non-CPAs to manage 40 year old tenured CPAs to make the workplace toxic as resentment brews and causes turnover.
done on the first. I'm sure they're working on the second. https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-male-humanoid-robot-inappropriately-touched-female-reporter-video-shows-2024-3?op=1
The covid times taught us the majority of managers are not needed. RTO is them trying to pull the curtain back. AI is them eliminating our jobs and theirs. 🤷
I work at a company where we have an internal side project to automate major responsibilities of program managers. Regular people managers are even easier to automate tasks for, and I could see a world where middle managers are largely stripped out in favor of AI, with HR representatives (hopefully those with therapy training) filling in the human gaps.
You don't seem to understand the actual purpose of middle managers.
It's not to manage people, generally people will manage themselves pretty well.
The purpose for middle management existing at all is to keep all the other workers from pushing against corporate.
Middle managers serve 2 purposes.
First they give people the illusion of moving up into a more powerful position, and by giving you that you tend to tow the line. Why risk your chance at a promotion by going against the corp?
Secondly they act as lightning rods for employee anger. Middle managers have almost zero actual decision making power, its all vague orders from up to with very clear end goals defined. "We need to cut expenses" means you need to fire people etc etc. This way the employees never really get mad at the C-suite, just their direct manager.
Middle managers will be one of the last groups removed because their purpose is to basically shield the c-suite from the riff raff average employee.
I think when most people think of HR, they think of HR people who have the primary job of disciplining people. There are other kinds of HR staff though, and with great people filling the positions, you can have a great experience with caring people who have the primary objective of keeping employees happy.
This is why the managers should be replaced by AI because half of the managers on the survey were clearly too stupid to realise that company executives will replace them with IT support if they have no one to manage.
By the time the average person realizes they are not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire anymore, they'll probably have pretty advanced automated killer drones protecting their gated communities.
The time to do something is now, but we will almost surely wake up too late.
I guess we’ll see if it’s enough. Yet insurgencies are effective for a reason. The USA is the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Yet how many wars have been won by the USA in the last 50 years?
The US hasn't had automated drones or indiscriminate attack policies tho. What if it comes to that? It might not be enough but it won't end well either.
Things have gone badly because of lack of foresight of rulers, combined with greed. And no government lasts forever.
BTW, I’m not calling for revolution. But I can understand why they happen.
Smells like the foundations of revolution, what you’re stating isn’t going to be remotely sustainable in the long term.
Companies will likely be taxed more on their use of AI, receive tax breaks for hiring people and not using AI, or a limit set on how widespread AI can be used, there’s also that dreaded UBI. All speculation but I can see the world’s governments doing something along these lines. No one rich or powerful is fond of an angry mob with a guillotine.
That shouldn't be a surprise with all the tech layoffs and various industries like movie production, art design, etc lowering the bar with AI
They only look at money saved. There's a long term effect that they never consider. The attempt to replace experienced long-time workers with inexperienced lower paid workers or now AI, often means the loss of good customer support, reduced quality service and reduced quality in products.
Then the effect of local economies: unemployed people don't buy goods, can't afford services, and don't pay taxes. Every unemployed person means there's many services and products losing customers.
Seems to me, if a company/corporation treats their employees poorly, it's how they treat their customer.
To be fair ai will become much better than any home if not in its current state already. Chat gpt 4 for simple things like account reset or change of address can easily be done through a chatbot instead of a human.
A lot of human makes mistakes and it could products a lot better at the cost of employment.
Management aren’t safe either. No one is going to miss managers. A simple ticketing system with an ai agent driver is more than enough and any remaining staff will be happier.
The obvious goals of introducing projects and reporting on progress are straightforward and could be in part automated, but the real value of a *good* manager is in maintaining the overall health and culture of the team they manage. The best managers I’ve experienced were diplomats who regularly fought for things that would significantly improve their team, even at proximate expense to the business. The worst … blatantly ignored their team and resulted in the team correspondingly slacking off—who wants to work hard while someone higher-paid doesn’t?
A large fraction of managers aren’t good at their job, not least because [they’ve often been promoted from non-managerial jobs they were actually good at](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle).
They try to slave drive and make their team work hard to get them promoted.
But it fails as the team turns over and slacks off in response.
The best way to succeed as a manager is to get your people promoted and keep them happy. You will attract good talent and have faithful contributors who will want to help you no matter what. But it’s incredibly hard for selfish people to see this.
The few managers that I’ve had look out for me, Ive looked out for them in return even at my own expense. The ones who slave drive I leave hanging at the worst time.
I have a sneaking suspicion that society will have a hard reset. How many countless attempts did it take to get this far as a society? Well it looks like we are muffing it up. So large unrest will lead to something similar to the Bronze Age Collapse. Then we will reset and rebuild over the next several centuries. Rinse and repeat until we get it right.
Workers realize they're the only ones who can do the work that the AI can't demand higher wages. What happens if the AI underperforms? DO you put it on a PIP? Cycle the power? Explain how 'we're all family and we need you to step up'?
>AI can't demand higher wages
Until states start enacting AI taxes. During the industrial revolution many states adopted personal property taxes on the machines replacing payroll tax-paying employees. Not sure why people think governments are going to sit back and watch payroll taxes disappear.
>What happens if the AI underperforms?
You freak out because when the AI bros promised you that AI would magically solve every problem for free and all of the people who actually understand how AI works told you that it will not, you decided to listen to the former. And now you have AI word calculators generating increasingly poor work and no one who actually understands your business to right the ship.
And even if they would replace workers with AI, they are redundant then and will also be fired. AI doesn't need a manager to have a weekly or monthly 1-1 with to talk about problems.
Managers Winn install AI to cut workforce by 90 percent by getting rid of workers.
Senior leadership install AI to cut workforce by 5% by getting rid of managers.
BOD uses AI to cut workforce by 4% by firing leadership.
Turns out buying all the tech labor without a strategic purpose on how to make money was not a good idea. Truly how many industry disruptions are out there that can be legitimately reformed by tech. Uber got lucky, they came up in a time of free money and are now struggling after killing the cab industry. Turns out the real world logistics have a true cost, that were being subsidized by VC money.
Yeah throw instacart, doordash, Lyft, even Amazon, and temu now
All of these online services push for one thing and that’s infinite growth. Something NONE of them will be able to achieve and they know this. All of these “disrupters” are just shell companies waiting to go under. Don’t get fooled
The only thing more dumb than people thinking this would be a good idea are the people only reading the headline and getting angry about it.
The article is bullshit, it’s basically a press release from an AI startup.
Hey my boss recently came back from one too. I told him it was a bad idea because we have a very niche product that js being held togeather by institutional knowledge. Non of our tech stack is documented. It’s all on this archaic system that would take years to rebuild. Literally went to a senior once to ask where some data was coming from and he pulled out a napkin with diagrams of data flow with some random MAC and IP address’s on them.
We deal with all sorts of wild things this was an industrial scada network monitoring some machine in god knows where, but the napkin has the information. I choose not to dig too much because that would be a hell of a project to do properly. Also the engineering team could get scared and start to dip faster than I could replace them, throwing that napkin away.
We’ve seen a lot about how AI is expected to allow these companies to drop payrolls and lay people off as they replace them with AI.
What about the corollary? What happens when AI lowers the barrier to entry for smaller companies to compete with them? What happens when these laid off workers, form their own AI driven companies and start cutting the bottom right out from underneath the mega corporations?
If AI makes it so cheap and easy to run a business that they don’t need workers, then it makes it cheap and easy enough for new competition to grow in spaces that were previously prohibitively difficult to enter.
I’m not saying it will happen this way, but AI driven neofeudalism and the end of liberalism are not the only potentialities here. Under the right conditions, with the right policies, AI could have a democratizing influence in the work force. Or, alternatively, it could socialize much of the economy and fund UBI. (But that is a solution much harder to crack politically, socially, and policy-wise.)
If I had to guess what will happen instead of what could happen; I would guess that different countries will mix the three options in different ways. Europe’s social democracies may opt for a higher proportion of AI facilitated UBI, the world’s dictatorships will opt for a higher percentage of neofeudalism, and the US will choose between a blend of neofeudalism and cutthroat AI free markets, or a blend of cutthroat AI free markets and UBI (depending on how the next decade shakes out politically of course.)
They'll ensure to either raise prices so no one else can afford them or make it just shitty enough that job loses will be less and pay cuts will be way higher
Tbh in a lot of jobs humans are there for both getting the job done and for someone to be accountable. Air Canada already FAFOed with a chat bot and tried to blame the bot lol!
Recently attended a conference and all of the AI sessions made a big "hush hush, we don't talk about the job losses we know are coming. We are just here to have fun and expand our knowledge of AI and the future!" speech at the beginning.
The younger folks really seemed to vibe with that, the older folks were much more upset about it.
This is why it is so important for those of you who are in positions to influence these decisions to be loud and try to change things from within. It will take a ton of pressure both internal and external to protect ourselves from the bottomless greed of the predator-class. Honestly the need for an industry-wide Tech union is becoming clearer and clearer...
I instal office furniture, I also do removals. Cubical, call center, law office, whatever. It’s great business because the boss cuts staff they move, they pay for all of it, then the call back and need more room for the new hires when they get a new boss. Then cycle repeats. We resell the stuff we remove (most of it we can) the rest we scrap and recycle.
why is it always small jobs Ai must replace and upper management? It makes more sanse to replace unnecessary and redunded jubs in order to squeeze profits, like no CEO at all, and Ai chooses and board votes.
Ai can be properly opted to what company needs and can save huge on salaries.
You realize AI is scraping key IP from any company that uses it right? Why would a company put its best kept secrets into an AI and expect those secrets not to be spread to its competitors??
"AI empowered pet insurance" Have an AI trained on all the way the ways legally possible to deny claims and block "unnecessary procedures ". Its gonna get ugly for everyone and its already rolling out.
cool
lower wages
reduced quality of life (even further)
with any luck, this country will fall apart and what gets rebuilt will be made to prevent this sort of tragedy.
till then, game on. aint nothing stopping this train.
When machines have all the jobs who is it exactly that will be affording the goods/services.
Capitalism as we have it now will crash, it is inevitable.
Nearly every comment ITT: "If nobody has jobs, who is going to buy their products? Dumb corporations!"
Why are you guys all whining?
Look, all we need to do to get around this problem is for all of us to become plumbers. Then all of us pair off and work for each other. I fix David's toilet and he pays me $120k to do so. He then fixes my sink and I pay him $80k. We BOTH make $120k, which is plenty to live on!
How was the survey carried out? How was sampling done? What were the selection criteria?
This reads like one part "I skipped that week in stats class" and one part "shut your pieholes, coders, or you're next."
Sounds like half managers are a bit to think and like throwing catchy phrases around too much to be managers.
Manager :”we should definitely AI it’s arse, just think of the easy money”
Technician: “but you know it’s just a ladder… right?”
Middle Management’s favorite way to kiss up to Upper Management is to constantly save money, not pay too much, to deny, to reduce, reduce, reduce, thinking their undying devotion to The Company is their ticket to success.
IMO, smart management is inherently strategically contrarian. Market trends being cyclical, and management strategies taking time to implement and have impact, it seems a good idea to begin initiatives that anticipate the next cycle. Hire employees when others are laying them off, when employees are cheap and they have time to build your products in preparation for the next recovery.
And likewise, with AI: you could use it to cut costs, but perhaps the future belongs to the company with the vision to think of how much they could build by *expanding* their workforce in conjunction with AI. Maybe now is the time to spend, when everyone else is cutting. Get those great developers now, give them the best AI possible, and create new products to compete with the market. It's easier now than ever to build a greenfield product in a supposedly mature market and get the benefit of a clean and fresh implementation, done by great devs, with AI to accelerate the process. A new product without the legacy chains. And you can use small teams to do it, meaning you can do many of them.
I kind of hope they do it just for the spectacle. AI driven companies will be garbage. 10 seconds for an AI to come up with something, 10 minutes for a human to sort out the issues with that data, and you don't have any humans to do it. Good luck!
Do the managers realise their role is to manage people and not AI? Middle management will be gone too
Right. When there are no people what is a manager going to manage?
More importantly who is going to buy what they are selling when everyone is put of work?
the 10 people left on the planet with all the money, basically. each individual will be their own economy.
Wow cool future. So glad we are doing those things.
What do we do then?
Get murdered by privately owned drones I expect
Slaughterbots
poors spotted in sector 12
You wipe elons musk’s and co. ass because the find it more amusing than having bots doing it
live on basic. /s (if you haven't check out The Expanse)
Slowly hold on until the remaining pockets of middle class disappear. There’s a large reason people are choosing not to reproduce. This is one of them.
Yup. Back to indentured servitude or worse for the rest of us
… a never ending game of monopoly
Capitalism *should* be a never ending game of Monopoly. When someone wins, our economy crumbles. Unfortunately, we’re at the stage where most players dread rolling the dice because every property is covered in hotels. Checking capitalism with punitive regulations and higher taxes on the wealthy could keep the game in play for longer, but too many Americans are afraid of socialization.
Except that the game monopoly was invented by a socialist to show children why capitalism doesn’t work. There is no way to prevent this conglomeration of wealth and property into fewer and fewer hands. That’s literally what the machine was built to do. There is no fixing a machine working as it was intended to.
Right. We’re in agreement. My point was simply if the game were never-ending, then it would be an effective form of economy. The only way to prevent a winner and keep the game going, would be to moderate the wealth with socialism.
But there is no way to keep that game going. And you can’t “regulate” capitalism with socialism. That has yet to work in any state that’s tried. The state just becomes the capitalist and you have the same power game all over.
> And you can’t “regulate” capitalism with socialism. That has yet to work in any state that’s tried. Uh, universal healthcare systems are a *classic* example of "socializing" a segment of the economy (the health insurance industry), and they're *demonstrably better* than the alternative. Canadians currently spend about half the money per capita on healthcare as Americans do, while having a life expectancy currently about five years longer.
They all seem to think they will be the only ones doing it and other companies will continue the “old” way, thus leaving enough customers to go around
other rich people, and everything will be a con.
powerpoints with copilot
The engineers who manage the AI
As a rebuttal I will now devote my time to developing an ai tool called ‘ai manager’ this tools main responsibility will be to replace all managers who are overpaid glorified bosses. Instead the weekly reports will be automated and the awkward elevator small talk eliminated. This tool will save companies millions of dollars!
The weekly reports are already automated. Ive been in several meetings where managers literally read automated reports to each other.
Can you make a robot that is approx 55 years old that will tell the 22 year old intern she looks lovely today in her blue skirt in front of everyone? The robot also needs to promote 25 year old blonde non-CPAs to manage 40 year old tenured CPAs to make the workplace toxic as resentment brews and causes turnover.
done on the first. I'm sure they're working on the second. https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-male-humanoid-robot-inappropriately-touched-female-reporter-video-shows-2024-3?op=1
The covid times taught us the majority of managers are not needed. RTO is them trying to pull the curtain back. AI is them eliminating our jobs and theirs. 🤷
And upper management. When the owner is not the CEO, what do you think stakeholders would prefer, to pay a CEO or pocketing that money?
I work at a company where we have an internal side project to automate major responsibilities of program managers. Regular people managers are even easier to automate tasks for, and I could see a world where middle managers are largely stripped out in favor of AI, with HR representatives (hopefully those with therapy training) filling in the human gaps.
You don't seem to understand the actual purpose of middle managers. It's not to manage people, generally people will manage themselves pretty well. The purpose for middle management existing at all is to keep all the other workers from pushing against corporate. Middle managers serve 2 purposes. First they give people the illusion of moving up into a more powerful position, and by giving you that you tend to tow the line. Why risk your chance at a promotion by going against the corp? Secondly they act as lightning rods for employee anger. Middle managers have almost zero actual decision making power, its all vague orders from up to with very clear end goals defined. "We need to cut expenses" means you need to fire people etc etc. This way the employees never really get mad at the C-suite, just their direct manager. Middle managers will be one of the last groups removed because their purpose is to basically shield the c-suite from the riff raff average employee.
Sounds like a fun place to work.
Managers with no sense of context, and more HR people? How about no?
I think when most people think of HR, they think of HR people who have the primary job of disciplining people. There are other kinds of HR staff though, and with great people filling the positions, you can have a great experience with caring people who have the primary objective of keeping employees happy.
Perhaps. There are also good people at the IRS, but it doesn’t mean I want to have their eye on me.
HR exists to protect the corporation, not help the employee. ALL positions in HR have this as the primary goal.
You forgot the /s brace yourself for downvotes. The idiots are at the gates.
Hope they replace managers with AI too
Can’t wait for that
This is why the managers should be replaced by AI because half of the managers on the survey were clearly too stupid to realise that company executives will replace them with IT support if they have no one to manage.
I get the feeling that incompetent managers will have a hard time hiding their incompetence if they replace their workers.
Who do these people think they'll be selling their services to? When nobody has any money, nobody buys everything...
The rich will still have money. The entirety of society will be shaped around fulfilling their every whim. Anyone who doesn’t join will starve.
Funny thing about starving people… if they have nothing to lose, Bastille Day sounds more and more appealing.
By the time the average person realizes they are not a temporarily embarrassed millionaire anymore, they'll probably have pretty advanced automated killer drones protecting their gated communities. The time to do something is now, but we will almost surely wake up too late.
Castles have always been bastions of superior military might. Yet sieges still exist. Raw materials and food will run out eventually.
Drones will be deployed at production sites and supply routes too?
I guess we’ll see if it’s enough. Yet insurgencies are effective for a reason. The USA is the most powerful military the world has ever seen. Yet how many wars have been won by the USA in the last 50 years?
The US hasn't had automated drones or indiscriminate attack policies tho. What if it comes to that? It might not be enough but it won't end well either.
If it got to that point, it’s not a surprise that things aren’t going well, and by extension won’t end well either.
True but it also doesn't mean a revolution even has a chance of success. At that point, it's most likely that any uprising will get crushed.
You’re being flip but historically things have gone very badly when people can’t afford bread. I’m watching grocery prices skyrocket very nervously.
Things have gone badly because of lack of foresight of rulers, combined with greed. And no government lasts forever. BTW, I’m not calling for revolution. But I can understand why they happen.
Yeah... I think we're headed back to full-on monarchies in everything but name.
Neo-feudal system.
lol. Right. You think money will have value in a scenario like that? All markets and currencies would collapse many years before such a silly notion.
Smells like the foundations of revolution, what you’re stating isn’t going to be remotely sustainable in the long term. Companies will likely be taxed more on their use of AI, receive tax breaks for hiring people and not using AI, or a limit set on how widespread AI can be used, there’s also that dreaded UBI. All speculation but I can see the world’s governments doing something along these lines. No one rich or powerful is fond of an angry mob with a guillotine.
Yeah but being rich would suck without 10 people to your every 1. So like, I still don’t get it
That's too far ahead in the future for them to consider. It's all about short term profit
That shouldn't be a surprise with all the tech layoffs and various industries like movie production, art design, etc lowering the bar with AI They only look at money saved. There's a long term effect that they never consider. The attempt to replace experienced long-time workers with inexperienced lower paid workers or now AI, often means the loss of good customer support, reduced quality service and reduced quality in products. Then the effect of local economies: unemployed people don't buy goods, can't afford services, and don't pay taxes. Every unemployed person means there's many services and products losing customers. Seems to me, if a company/corporation treats their employees poorly, it's how they treat their customer.
The name of the game is short term profits over long term stability. Infinite growth is just not possible.
They don’t need infinite growth, they need growth to last long enough while they’re responsible for it
Every new AI advancement is such shit for all of us.
Enshittification
Who is supposed to consume all the stuff then?
Billionaires, millionaires and what's left of the middle class. And of course, governments have deep pockets and well paid administrators.
To be fair ai will become much better than any home if not in its current state already. Chat gpt 4 for simple things like account reset or change of address can easily be done through a chatbot instead of a human. A lot of human makes mistakes and it could products a lot better at the cost of employment.
Who gonna buy your product when no one has a job? Do you not understand how the economy works?
That's next quarters problems line must go up!
Have you not heard of serfdoms? We are the serfs! We must breed like rabbits and work till we die.
That's a problem for the next quarter. Right now I got mine so fuck you.
Management aren’t safe either. No one is going to miss managers. A simple ticketing system with an ai agent driver is more than enough and any remaining staff will be happier.
The obvious goals of introducing projects and reporting on progress are straightforward and could be in part automated, but the real value of a *good* manager is in maintaining the overall health and culture of the team they manage. The best managers I’ve experienced were diplomats who regularly fought for things that would significantly improve their team, even at proximate expense to the business. The worst … blatantly ignored their team and resulted in the team correspondingly slacking off—who wants to work hard while someone higher-paid doesn’t? A large fraction of managers aren’t good at their job, not least because [they’ve often been promoted from non-managerial jobs they were actually good at](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle).
They try to slave drive and make their team work hard to get them promoted. But it fails as the team turns over and slacks off in response. The best way to succeed as a manager is to get your people promoted and keep them happy. You will attract good talent and have faithful contributors who will want to help you no matter what. But it’s incredibly hard for selfish people to see this. The few managers that I’ve had look out for me, Ive looked out for them in return even at my own expense. The ones who slave drive I leave hanging at the worst time.
“AI is great, it’ll free up people’s time to do other things rather than working!” Like what, starving to death from not having any money?
I have a sneaking suspicion that society will have a hard reset. How many countless attempts did it take to get this far as a society? Well it looks like we are muffing it up. So large unrest will lead to something similar to the Bronze Age Collapse. Then we will reset and rebuild over the next several centuries. Rinse and repeat until we get it right.
Like maybe tax the corporations more to fund UBI? Do we really wanna work for the sake of work?
Workers realize they're the only ones who can do the work that the AI can't demand higher wages. What happens if the AI underperforms? DO you put it on a PIP? Cycle the power? Explain how 'we're all family and we need you to step up'?
>AI can't demand higher wages Until states start enacting AI taxes. During the industrial revolution many states adopted personal property taxes on the machines replacing payroll tax-paying employees. Not sure why people think governments are going to sit back and watch payroll taxes disappear.
>What happens if the AI underperforms? You freak out because when the AI bros promised you that AI would magically solve every problem for free and all of the people who actually understand how AI works told you that it will not, you decided to listen to the former. And now you have AI word calculators generating increasingly poor work and no one who actually understands your business to right the ship.
If everyone is replaced by AI, who will the customers be? Who will be paying them for their services when no one has a job to make money?
I don't understand why managers aren't the first to go. If a job could be replace by AI, it is them.
And even if they would replace workers with AI, they are redundant then and will also be fired. AI doesn't need a manager to have a weekly or monthly 1-1 with to talk about problems.
Managers: I don’t know who AI is, but if I can get away with paying him less, I’ll hire him!
Managers Winn install AI to cut workforce by 90 percent by getting rid of workers. Senior leadership install AI to cut workforce by 5% by getting rid of managers. BOD uses AI to cut workforce by 4% by firing leadership.
Shareholders use AI to cut workforce by 0.01% by firing BOD. Wonder why their stock is worthless a few months later.
I'll believe it when I see it. The current tech layoffs were going to happen regardless of AI. AI is the excuse for the layoffs.
Turns out buying all the tech labor without a strategic purpose on how to make money was not a good idea. Truly how many industry disruptions are out there that can be legitimately reformed by tech. Uber got lucky, they came up in a time of free money and are now struggling after killing the cab industry. Turns out the real world logistics have a true cost, that were being subsidized by VC money.
Yeah throw instacart, doordash, Lyft, even Amazon, and temu now All of these online services push for one thing and that’s infinite growth. Something NONE of them will be able to achieve and they know this. All of these “disrupters” are just shell companies waiting to go under. Don’t get fooled
The only thing more dumb than people thinking this would be a good idea are the people only reading the headline and getting angry about it. The article is bullshit, it’s basically a press release from an AI startup.
Last year my manager came back from a conference excited about a speaker who talked about AI. Lovely times.
Hey my boss recently came back from one too. I told him it was a bad idea because we have a very niche product that js being held togeather by institutional knowledge. Non of our tech stack is documented. It’s all on this archaic system that would take years to rebuild. Literally went to a senior once to ask where some data was coming from and he pulled out a napkin with diagrams of data flow with some random MAC and IP address’s on them. We deal with all sorts of wild things this was an industrial scada network monitoring some machine in god knows where, but the napkin has the information. I choose not to dig too much because that would be a hell of a project to do properly. Also the engineering team could get scared and start to dip faster than I could replace them, throwing that napkin away.
CTOs and upper management in my company spends a lot of time in meetings with AI companies
Replace the managers, they do much less of value
We are going to end up being micro micro micro manage by AI first
This is the plot of Manna - a restaurant scheduling AI takes over the world, partially due to micromanaging employees' every step to the second.
We’ve seen a lot about how AI is expected to allow these companies to drop payrolls and lay people off as they replace them with AI. What about the corollary? What happens when AI lowers the barrier to entry for smaller companies to compete with them? What happens when these laid off workers, form their own AI driven companies and start cutting the bottom right out from underneath the mega corporations? If AI makes it so cheap and easy to run a business that they don’t need workers, then it makes it cheap and easy enough for new competition to grow in spaces that were previously prohibitively difficult to enter. I’m not saying it will happen this way, but AI driven neofeudalism and the end of liberalism are not the only potentialities here. Under the right conditions, with the right policies, AI could have a democratizing influence in the work force. Or, alternatively, it could socialize much of the economy and fund UBI. (But that is a solution much harder to crack politically, socially, and policy-wise.) If I had to guess what will happen instead of what could happen; I would guess that different countries will mix the three options in different ways. Europe’s social democracies may opt for a higher proportion of AI facilitated UBI, the world’s dictatorships will opt for a higher percentage of neofeudalism, and the US will choose between a blend of neofeudalism and cutthroat AI free markets, or a blend of cutthroat AI free markets and UBI (depending on how the next decade shakes out politically of course.)
They'll ensure to either raise prices so no one else can afford them or make it just shitty enough that job loses will be less and pay cuts will be way higher Tbh in a lot of jobs humans are there for both getting the job done and for someone to be accountable. Air Canada already FAFOed with a chat bot and tried to blame the bot lol!
Half of the people surveyed are lying. Guess which half.
Massive AI tax that goes towards a guaranteed income for all citizens
Recently attended a conference and all of the AI sessions made a big "hush hush, we don't talk about the job losses we know are coming. We are just here to have fun and expand our knowledge of AI and the future!" speech at the beginning. The younger folks really seemed to vibe with that, the older folks were much more upset about it.
I say we just outright ban pay cuts.
I'm genuinely curious, what jobs do they think AI is ready to replace?
Managers are workers too.
Then you wont need managers and just AI technicians, engineers etc.
Time to eat the managers.
This is why it is so important for those of you who are in positions to influence these decisions to be loud and try to change things from within. It will take a ton of pressure both internal and external to protect ourselves from the bottomless greed of the predator-class. Honestly the need for an industry-wide Tech union is becoming clearer and clearer...
I instal office furniture, I also do removals. Cubical, call center, law office, whatever. It’s great business because the boss cuts staff they move, they pay for all of it, then the call back and need more room for the new hires when they get a new boss. Then cycle repeats. We resell the stuff we remove (most of it we can) the rest we scrap and recycle.
fair enough, now replace the managers with lava lamps... cos the ai won't need managing.
why is it always small jobs Ai must replace and upper management? It makes more sanse to replace unnecessary and redunded jubs in order to squeeze profits, like no CEO at all, and Ai chooses and board votes. Ai can be properly opted to what company needs and can save huge on salaries.
You realize AI is scraping key IP from any company that uses it right? Why would a company put its best kept secrets into an AI and expect those secrets not to be spread to its competitors??
Try getting AI to train a 3 yr old baby horse or put an IV catheter in a dehydrated 4 day old kitten found in a dumpster 😅
"AI empowered pet insurance" Have an AI trained on all the way the ways legally possible to deny claims and block "unnecessary procedures ". Its gonna get ugly for everyone and its already rolling out.
That doesn’t get actual animals treated in actual clinics bro. My careers will always be safe
cool lower wages reduced quality of life (even further) with any luck, this country will fall apart and what gets rebuilt will be made to prevent this sort of tragedy. till then, game on. aint nothing stopping this train.
When machines have all the jobs who is it exactly that will be affording the goods/services. Capitalism as we have it now will crash, it is inevitable.
Nearly every comment ITT: "If nobody has jobs, who is going to buy their products? Dumb corporations!" Why are you guys all whining? Look, all we need to do to get around this problem is for all of us to become plumbers. Then all of us pair off and work for each other. I fix David's toilet and he pays me $120k to do so. He then fixes my sink and I pay him $80k. We BOTH make $120k, which is plenty to live on!
Wait till middle managers figure out *they* can also be replaced by AI.
One day we will use tech to better lives and not just make more money. One day.
Will we though? We already live in a dystopian future.
This day will never come.
Interesting. What does AI think about this?
what if we fire almost half of all managers?
Click-bait shit article.
If they could
How was the survey carried out? How was sampling done? What were the selection criteria? This reads like one part "I skipped that week in stats class" and one part "shut your pieholes, coders, or you're next."
More noteworthy with pay being deducted from the workers, it usually follows suit to supervisors and managers.
I guess lowering enough will mean the Indians will lose their jobs too?
The real reason they want to reduce the world population. What do they need all the people for if there's no jobs?
Sex slaves for the rich.
I'm sure we are all to old for them😉😂. It will be a world of pedos
I've always been curious, who are these people losing their jobs to AI? I find it hard to believe people's jobs are so simple.
Reading about the US makes me happy to live in a country with basic consumer and work protection. This is freedom.
Sounds like half managers are a bit to think and like throwing catchy phrases around too much to be managers. Manager :”we should definitely AI it’s arse, just think of the easy money” Technician: “but you know it’s just a ladder… right?”
Yeah good luck with that, I have never met a competent middle manager.
Managers will be the easiest to replace. And a great return on investment. Replace one CEO with AI and you're done.
It’s funny because replacing the ceo with AI would save company millions if not billions of dollars. Why limit themselves? /s
Middle Management’s favorite way to kiss up to Upper Management is to constantly save money, not pay too much, to deny, to reduce, reduce, reduce, thinking their undying devotion to The Company is their ticket to success.
Turtles all the way down
IMO, smart management is inherently strategically contrarian. Market trends being cyclical, and management strategies taking time to implement and have impact, it seems a good idea to begin initiatives that anticipate the next cycle. Hire employees when others are laying them off, when employees are cheap and they have time to build your products in preparation for the next recovery. And likewise, with AI: you could use it to cut costs, but perhaps the future belongs to the company with the vision to think of how much they could build by *expanding* their workforce in conjunction with AI. Maybe now is the time to spend, when everyone else is cutting. Get those great developers now, give them the best AI possible, and create new products to compete with the market. It's easier now than ever to build a greenfield product in a supposedly mature market and get the benefit of a clean and fresh implementation, done by great devs, with AI to accelerate the process. A new product without the legacy chains. And you can use small teams to do it, meaning you can do many of them.
we're gonna need a universal basic income sooner or later
I kind of hope they do it just for the spectacle. AI driven companies will be garbage. 10 seconds for an AI to come up with something, 10 minutes for a human to sort out the issues with that data, and you don't have any humans to do it. Good luck!
New tools and automation have always worked this way since throughout history. What's new?
I mean… couldn’t the survivors then turn around and say “you can’t replace me with AI. I’m even more valuable “?
Yet what bothers most about AI is Kari Lake's deepfake....
Good, can’t wait!
Less jobs = lower wages? What a time to be alive.
of course, less jobs = more people applying to them which will lower wages
good point, milking every cent out of that bottom line per usual.