Think of the hilarity and irony of the title itself.
How could you, really, interview All of the employers Worldwide, and ask them an even relatively correct estimate of a 2030 figure, when they can't even predict what Q3 will look like accurately. "Oh but it's just trend gathering".
41% of the business today won't exist by 2028.
And reduce, reduce staff by what? 2%, 10%, 50%?
This is just so silly.
The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, which covers more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerges from the survey is that employers believe many of their workers don’t have the skills needed to do their jobs as technology evolves.
While I share your skepticism about the viability or specificity of predictions, large think tanks do this sort of research all the time and provide at least some indication of where corporate weathervanes are pointing and trends in business management, be they fundamental or faddish.
This information was all laid out in the first 2 paragraphs. You could have critiqued their track record or methods rather than asserting such questions are meaningless. Why do you think it's so outlandish to survey ~1000 corporations, especially if that's your raison d'etre and you do it twice a year, every year?
41% of the business today won't exist by 2028.
You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
The average life span of a business is short. Even for S&P500 companies it's only 15 years[0], if we take in all the startup and small/individual businesses, parent's 3 year bet is aggressive, but not completely unreasonable.
[0] https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights/consulting/how-businesses-...
I'm also guessing the WEF's survey list skews heavily, if not entirely, to large, established employers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyworks_Solutions
I think this is still on point with what the parent was alluding to: if your company lives and dies by M&As, do you have a clear vision of what the future will be in even a few years ? When two company merges, one of the vision mechanically dies after all.
It might be an extreme, but streaming services for instance are their own companies within a group, and outside of the biggest two or three ones they get merged/split way more than we'd expect.
I experienced the same in the restaurant field, where middle sized companies would get merged, become a business unit, then get spinned out again as independant entities, to get absorbed some other faceless blob. When enough money is involved these kind of operation are relatively fluid.
Not necessarily. When you look at the lifecycle of a company, the numbers are quite harsh[0]:
> 23.2% of private sector businesses in the U.S. fail within the first year. After five years, 48.0% have faltered. After 10 years, 65.3% of businesses have closed.
So the parent's figure is exaggerated but not by a large margin.
[0] https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/
It's not. The discipline of statistics knows a lot about population sizes, sample sizes, margins of error, and that sort of thing. If you're going to seriously question the fundamental ideas in statistics, there's a whole lot of empirical evidence you need to refute.
> Should an advertiser be able to claim the same immunity?
Have you ever purchased anything that was marketed using statistics? Lots of things, I imagine. How many polls have you answered about those statistics? I'm not really sure how you'd get the impression that anything else was ever the case.
Agreed. This is just fear-baiting.
I think many of us on Hacker News underestimate the depths to which middle tier managers will go to appease higher ups.
Even in the case where AI productivity is total fiction, that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on the workload given to a single worker.
All the way back to Pharaoh in the Bible when he is quoted as saying, 'They are relaxing! Let them make bricks without straw!'
Hiring reduction doesn't require an entirely real productivity boost.
It only requires the MBA and Management Consulting led perception that hiring fewer humans is now the smart thing to do!
The survivors envy the dead: what few resources remain are devoted to an arms race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on building the tallest and most efficient phallus to nowhere.
The only way for anyone, wherever they were born, to be part of the rocket class is to apply for an H1B visa. The lowest rate of accepted applications is in East Palo Alto.
Surfer Zuck hasn’t been seen in decades.
But a suspicious and perpetually young version of him, in the exact same office background and a weirdly off voice, regularly appears in video messages before every earnings call. He speaks of great opportunity and growth for the Meta Quest X, and assures the investors that the scant few humans remaining are perfectly targeted for the next wave of MetaM-8s to find them, corner them, then display enough ads on their chest screen until the victims give in and willingly max out their Bezos Card as each bot meticulously records their frantic taps through the checkout process.
In the distance, the next set of competing space rockets roar off into an orange sky choked with delivery drones.
But seeing that your businesses make the world worse and not doing anything seems completely short sighted. These folks have children, too - what kind of world they want to leave them?
It’s borderline ridiculous that insulin could bankrupt a working family or that a retiree could be homeless or that home ownership among family-aged people could be in free fall with no bottom in sight or a thousand other things could even be possible if Bill Gates opposed them with any vigor.
But look at his actions and not his words: at every step for 50 years he has deployed ruthless, bare-knuckled brutality to centralize welfare and influence. He was so egregious that the Department of Justice took time off from chasing arms dealers, terrorist, human traffickers, and other assorted villains they go after to fuck with a domestic economic Cinderella story because it was so badly harmful to the broader welfare.
In the 90s when I started hacking seriously there was a meme before we even called it that of him in Star Trek Borg kit captioned: “Resistance is Futile”.
At what point do we take seriously the theory consistent with all the evidence?
It’s an elegant idea that is just obviously false.
Whether they will all get around to it or not I don't know but they enthusiasm they have for it is tremendous. I have no plans to cut staff within my own company but I also see very little headcount growth as being necessary in the next few years.
The mechanisms here are simple and plausible,
1) The task now is to train people on how to use generative AI to get more done - if you think this trend doesn't exist you really do have your head in the sand, this is happening, now, today, some roles and people do better with it than others but it is happening.
2) The upcoming task will be to let go of the least efficient performers, who have not increased their productivity by incorporating generative AI into their workflow. It will work, a part of the staff will complete X% more tasks, this will translate into X% of jobs being made redundant. When this large cost cutting opportunity exists and execs are basically chomping at the bit to make it happen, it will be super hard to achieve a positive hiring climate.
Now in eras past this might have been blunted by a number of factors, but all these factors are on their last legs:
A) Quality is a real issue when you double someone's workload and tell them to get it done using GenAI. However the global economy is increasingly consolidated under large firms that possess a lot of market power - they are too big and entrenched to be unseated, so they don't really have to deliver quality, they know this, they can just be shitty monopolies, cut costs, and feast anyway because the barriers to entry for competition are too high, consumer switching costs are too high etc. Quality is just going to go down and that is just going to be the new world. Big tech understands this opportunity better than anyone else, every single one of them is a criminal enterprise, and due to weak government enforcement every single one of them is still posting amazing profits
B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth. The nature of compounding numbers is that it's a slow burn until suddenly it isn't and if you look at a 10+ year horizon absolutely firms are thinking about this and they know there is no reversal to this trend, there is no gearing up for a future where everything suddenly doubles, long term the goal is to prepare for the shuttering of a lot of operations, adapting to markets being smaller, and this of course means managing a secular downward trend for your headcount, not upward.
It is a very precarious time we are entering, we either need to start busting trusts and making babies again, or the way of life that we knew is going to end. AI if anything is what is going to help us limp along into the twilight without a complete collapse of the value chain. Either way there is going to be a pretty limited appetite for new hiring in the foreseeable future due to a confluence of trends.
Even in the case of population growth things will not look better especially because we are in the middle of a tragedy of the commons, we are exhausting the resources of the planet faster than what it takes to regenerate them. What's the plan for more consumption when there's nothing to produce? or that cost so much that only a few could afford that?