Tech sector is pouring billions of dollars into AI. It keeps laying off humans
cnn.com
cnn.com
Sounds reasonable to me.
The article doesn't really try to argue "the obvious connection across these companies" aside from a couple of sentences. Most of the article is spent discussing off layoffs and AI investments without attempting to link the two.
Just to point out, this particular article does make the claim these are connected.
E.g., "...tech firms have explicitly cited AI as a reason for rethinking head counts" (There are a few fuzzy details later as well.)
yeah, only for one paragraph:
> Last year, companies including Chegg, IBM and Dropbox cited the onset of AI as a reason to rethink staffing. More recently, Duolingo and even Google have suggested the same as they seek to mobilize resources to capitalize on the AI boom.
And everything before and after that is either fluff or does not make the claim that they're connected. For instance layoffs at Amazon was brought up early in the article, but it's unclear how that has to do with AI. Google is brought up as well, but if you click through the source, the layoffs has less to do with "AI replacing workers" (as the article suggests) and more "google is laying off in the hardware part of the business because they want to focus on the AI part".
The article is pretty clear that it isn't just talking about AI directly replacing workers. From the second sentence of the article: "...not all the recent layoffs in the tech industry are directly linked to AI tools simply replacing workers" and goes on to explain from there that they are talking about companies changing what they are spending money on.
training workloads that cost tens of millions of dollars might
The only people espousing AI magic are those who used it for "lol generate me an HTML/JavaScript book about AI that has pagination" or "lol build me a linked list" or serious researchers in traditional AI areas.
This has everything to do with COVID over-hiring and a ton of people coasting because they are used to doing nothing from when everyone was desperate for devs.
When I looked for people a year ago, the market was still tight and frankly things seemed hopeless. We struggled along with an undersized team. I now have really good people walking up unsolicited. That hasn’t happened for many years. It’s a welcome change.
This is little-picture, short-sighted thinking. A one-for-one replacement of a specific kind of employee is not a requirement to statistically displace employees across a workforce. AI tooling can augment the productivity of existing employees, which results in a lessened need for human labour. And you're making the baseless assumption that we have achieved the pinnacle of AI development. This problem will only get worse as AI tooling improves.
It absolutely did...and you literally said it yourself. What is "more efficiency" except a reduced need for labour for a fixed unit of "productivity"?
Last February I was writing a book on ‘safe AI’ and after I wrote each chapter, I had ChatGPT read it and asked for additional topics I may have neglected. It was also good for generating end of chapter summaries that I re-worded to fit my style.
For the last ten years I have tried to be on a ‘digital diet’ - limiting time on digital devices except for high productivity sprints. This includes limiting time on HN and X. It feels good to use AI tools to get more done quickly so I have more time to cook elaborate meals for my family, hike and hang out with my friends, and read.
You can 100% find better setups than mine. Once I get things working, I don’t change until something new is much better.
I could see after some time that custom AI apps/prompts could supplant traditional search that has been around for 25 years. SEO will become irrelevant when custom AI tools exist that narrow the focus and allow follow-up questions and context.
Unions are also the way.
It's a tale as old as time.
Some kind of universal basic income tempts my thinking as a solution to not having enough need for labor anymore.
UBI might be better than nothing, but boy are people going to be lost without social mobility and purpose. Hopefully we can find that some other way if all labor is ever replaced. Which I am skeptical about.
Have you read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs? He talks about how a lot of the British music scene of the 60's and 70's was basically funded by social welfare programs. Broke kids having time to hone their craft.
It could be another renaissance
Just because somenthing happened organically/by chance in the past, doesn't automatically mean you can just replicate the same result today by forcing thse same policies from the 60's in the world of today. You might definitely get a completely different outcome.
We had something like that during the pandemic. Kids, or young adults, were blowing it all their easy money on crypto and $GME stonks which led to tonnes of get-rich-quick scammers and pyramid schemes, not making new music or art at home.
Also, the generation of The Baatles didn't have their brains fried by endless doom scroling on tiktok, social media and Fortnite. If they were bored at home with no job, they had little escapism so listening to other artists and creating their own competing content was the go-to, while today if you've got no job and are sitting bored at home there's million other hedonistic avenues of keeping yourself entertained that are much easier than having to pick up a guitar, learn to play it well and come up with meaningful lyrics.
Passionate artists and musicians will always find a way to create content they enjoy even if they'll still be broke as every generation before them. The Beatles of today are on twitch or youtube, creating content about the stuff their passionate about and getting funded via Patreon or other donations.
I have another anecdote to bring to the table. I'm from Eastern Europe and the best music, especailly hip-hop, that came out of my post-communist hellhole country was in the 90's when we had the worst possible economy, rampant inflation and crime, no jobs, no welfare, no money, no opportunities, nothing. But those times produced the best artists and football players(soccer for you guys). Now the economy and welfare is 100x better than back then, but the quality of art and music has gone down the toilet. Why is that? I think the new found prosperty brought with it a career focused culture and because now there's more and better things to do for money and entertainment than struggling with creating good music in a garage while broke.
So to me, it seems the most depressive economic periods produce the best art and music, and the abundant "easy times" produce the worst and least inspiring. It was similar to 50 Cent's "Get rich or die trying" or Eminem's "8 Mile", all these artist came from suffering of economic harship, not economic prosperity, but nobody sane in the head wants to bring back the hard times just so we could get better hip-hop and music.
And, note that the momentum-killer in all these cases was not organic, but institutions clawing back their riches - by hook, and certainly by crook, in many cases (I'm glad you mentioned GME). Return-to-office had every rational reason not to happen, and they forced it anyway.
Maybe AI job losses will spawn the next wave of amazing art and music...
I think that while we can say, art is art, people just like doing art, which I think is true for some people, there was also a major inventive to make good music in the 60s and 70s which will no longer be there if a machine can write an album in 20 seconds and steal your style almost instantaneously.
Maybe people will be using AI to make unimaginably good art and prosper from that, which I hope so but as it stands now, it's a very different situation to what happened in the past.
There is so much humans should be doing to make our brief existence a little more happy and fulfilling. Little of this has to do about contributing labor.
Eaxtly, spot on!
> If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building.
In an ideal utopic society, yes, but that's not what's happening. More automation replacing workers just means more people out of work from older jobs, means more competition and lower wages for the remaining few un-automatable jobs flooded with now jobless workers.
It's impossible to pull off if all the profits from automation go to those doing the automation instead of the disposed workers, but if those in charge of investing and reasearching automation would not get huge profits they wouldn't be motivated to invest in automation in the first place and we'd be back to the middle ages.
So what do we do? What's the realistic sollution? Do we go back to communism and have the state in charge of all economic planning and development? Maybe not since that doesn't works too well in the long run.
Ideally there should be a middle ground that's missing right now where replacing workers with autoamtion is done through union negociations at a steady pace to enure disposed labor can be retrained in newer careers.
Notice how rich people wear hoodies and train at the gym like everyone else now?
Always has been since humanity's ~200k year history. The unpriviledged masses having free time for leisure and entertainment between work and sleep that isn't a Sunday, is a relatively new development of about ~100 years or less, for which much blood has been spilled. My grandparents were doing subsistance farming working about ~14h/day, 6-7 days/week just to survive, while today I can have my needs met by clocking in 8h of work in an office 5 days/week.
Ideally we should strive for better, but we forget our ancestors had it way worse not too long ago.
Incorrect. If anything, the period during and immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution (before those hard-won labor victories) is the outlier. The common thread in the traditional societies that still exist is a great deal of leisure time or light physical labor, even for farmers. Through the Middle Ages and up to the the advent of chattel slavery and industrialization in the Americas and Europe, labor schedules were quite mild and left plenty of time for leisure, socializing, labor outside of primary production duties (chores, cooking, etc., through which creative faculties could be exercises); much of the literature describing back-breaking labor, written by the privileged classes, was actually a form of propaganda or wish-fulfillment fiction.
I'd suggest reading The Overworked American by Juliet Schor. It provides an overview of historical modes of labor in the West.
In theory, base on supply and demand, jobs should be priced at
difficulty * value * unpleasantness
Instead, a lot of the hardest, most important, and most unpleasant jobs pay some of the lowest wages, because they default land on the people with the least negotiating power (undocumented immigrants, prisoners, or those so stuck in crushing poverty they have to take the first option they get), and the employer gets to get away with paying well under the "market" value of the labor. So many jobs wouldn't exist at their current price point (if at all), if there was a basic minimum amount of "You can just about get by" money that everyone had.
Unions derive power from their ability to withhold labor. What's their leverage when their labor isn't needed anymore because of AI?
But will AI be able to surpass me bootlicking my boss?
A bigger factor in tech hiring trends
If AI kills the rat race, we're supposed to be sad about it?
I predict that someday soon, "it" will refer to an AI.
And then you might consider if that would actually make your company more human.
We are very far away from singularity. So anyone who can make systems more efficient or keep things running will have job for good while.