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Comment by nness | Hacker News Reader

I think AI will cause mass unemployment -- for whichever companies lay off staff after their AI pivot fails to materialise significant new revenue.

Which is not to say AI is going away, rather, every Silicon Valley tech company that is chasing this holy grail of miraculous untapped revenue are going to burn whatever cash/stock price they have left in the process...

(Dropbox and Meta feel particluarly at risk.)

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What are you referring to with Dropbox here?

They are exactly the type of company that I hope to god never tries to innovate very much. They provide exactly the type of service many of us need- 100% reliable file syncing.

I don't need them to do anything else and I don't want them to do anything else. So I'm not really sure what AI has to do with them..

Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI — https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/27/23700629/dropbox-laying-o...

Well, Dropbox is certainly hiring AI people.

https://jobs.dropbox.com/listing/4994763

"You will be the first Product Manager hire in the AI Center of Excellence, a company wide team mandated with driving AI centric product development across Dropbox."

Social networks for humans are the exact opposite of at risk. They're among the services most likely to continue to be used by humans, even if we suffer mass unemployment. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are free to use (if you're unemployed because AI shredded your job, you can keep your FB account regardless of your income) and have extreme operating margins.

The desire by humans to be social online isn't going anywhere. Rapidly advancing AI isn't going to make people stop wanting to connect with other people they know via social networking.

Generative AI and deep learning affect all types of office work. Picking on 2 companies would be entirely arbitrary and miss the point of what AI replace.

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