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Comment by akshaybhalotia | Hacker News Reader

I humbly disagree. I've seen team members and sometimes entire teams being laid off because of AI. It's also not just layoffs, the hiring processes and demand have been affected as well.

As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for support is pretty much down (anecdotal).

I agree that some automation is better for the humans to do their jobs better, but this isn't one of those. When you're looking for support, something has clearly went wrong. Speaking or typing to an AI which responds with random unrelated articles or "sorry I didn't quite get that" is just evading responsibility in the name of "progress", "development", "modernization", "futuristic", "technology", <insert term of choice>, etc.

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How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame? I've seen a number of companies go "AI first" and stop hiring or have layoffs (Salesforce comes to mind) but I suspect they would have been in a slump without AI entirely.

> How do you know that these layoffs are the result of AI, rather than AI being a convenient place to lay the blame?

Both of those can be true, because companies are placing bets that AI will replace a lot of human work (by layoffs and reduced hiring), while also using it in the short term as a reason to cut short term costs.

You are indeed correct according to my opinion. Salesforce went too deep into BlockChain and BigData and probably never recovered from the sunk costs. But to stay relevant they again need to risk another bet but also need to conserve(death by a thousand cuts and all) so they layoff while jumping on AI bandwagon. And how fortunate it is that LLM sellers tout productivity gain(zero backing data but hey) as a benefit, so it also falsely support their failure as a success.

AI is not hurting jobs in Denmark they said.

Software development jobs there have bigger threat: outsourcing to cheaper locations.

As well for teachers: it is hard to replace a person supervising kids with a chatbot.

Has any serious person every suggested replacing teachers with chatbots? Seems like a non sequitur.

Usually teachers are paid poorly, so some of them are putting little effort into the job simply narrate book/slides for their class. If they are replaced with latest chatgpt it will be beneficial for everyone.

> I humbly disagree

Both your experience and what the article (research) says can be valid at the same time. That’s how statistics works.

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