Why be sentimental about hiring or firing when tech is so fundamentally unsentimental about optimizing everything else?
So yeah.
I think the tech industry is especially susceptible to arguments based on efficiency because after all, that's what technology provides at a fundamental basis. We need to realize, as with many aspects within technology itself, there are tradeoffs to efficiency itself. You still have educated people who will tout efficiency above all else. I'm all for progress and improving efficiency but it has costs (and benefits) on the human condition and we need to understand and factor those costs in instead of only looking at benefits from efficiency gains.
As a kid I was naive and believed this same philosophy of efficiency and didn't understand why we didn't always push to technology to improve situations. As I've grown over the years I realize life is a lot more than obsessing over efficiency. Obsessing over efficiency only brought me misery while accepting a reasonable degree of inefficiency in my life in strategic areas brought me a lot of happiness. It's always important to think about what you're optimizing on and what the costs are. Imagine going to a restaurant and making your dinner purchase decision based on a metric like: $/calorie. It's probably the most economically efficient way to look at food (perhaps with a nutritional distribution factor as well), but who wants to live like that out of choice?
I think we can distinguish between them:
Long-term efficiency, where we get the most output over time by not burning anybody out, and by keeping morale high
And short-term efficiency, which is what everybody focuses on, because that's all shareholders care about (gains now!) and it results in the kind of soul-sucking capitalist rat race that you seem to think the entire country lives in.
I'm thinking also that this is a very city-minded view, or maybe a corporate-minded one, and if you were to make the decision to sacrifice some (a lot) of potential earnings and go found or work for a small business in a small town, you might find that not all parts of America value people only based on their contribution to the GDP.
In your restaurant example, using "$/calorie" metric will minimize money spend, but will have a negative externality of reducing your happiness. Once you realize this, you'll want to update your cost function to something like "max(satisfaction) limit to total(calories)>needed_nutrition and total($)<budget" etc... and you can use your efficiency search again.
(and then you get to third-order effects and start to think about time spent planning... Python's sort() switches to simpler algorithm for small arrays because overhead of starting up a complex algorithm is too high. The same way, you probably don't want to formulate and solve an efficiency optimization problem for the task of choosing your lunch because this is actually not that efficient :) )
I can visualize the unemployment caused by some optimization that I wrote, but emotions don't engage with abstractions. Until that means that Jared will have to go home and tell Laura that he has been fired and now they can't afford their house it doesn't engage emotions.
And my logic says, why should I care about a person I have never met? I am strictly worse of for having them in the first place.
a matter impacting human lives -> sentimental, i.e. cognizant of human cost
a matter impacting my program's performance -> not very sentimental, i.e no human cost to be cognizant of
How good it is will depend upon the quality of decisions that are made in designing it, starting with: What is the definition of "usefulness"?
I definitely think there is a room here to design a program that is more just in firing than a person would be. I guess it depends a lot on the benevolence or malevolence of our new computer overlords.