It’s Time To Get Concerned, Klarna, UPS, Duolingo, Cisco, And Many Other Companies Are Replacing Workers With AI
It’s Time To Get Concerned As More Companies Replace Workers With AI
We aren't going to all lose our jobs because AI can do them better.
We're going to all lose our jobs when the soggy bottom falls out of the stock market once the AI bubble pops, because AI companies- that have made no profit but burned through billions in venture capital- are being valued based on the assumption that they will be able to achieve infinite productivity Real Soon Now by inventing the artificial superintelligence that can put everyone out of a job.
A small silver lining is for all the experienced software engineers who will be needed to rewrite from scratch all the hopelessly broken slop-compomised vibecodebases for all the companies that sold their cow for magic beans out of fomo. I think it will be comparable to the late 90s hiring push to fix the Y2k bug.
Ok then, let all the jobs to AI and let the people have free houseing and food!
Seems like a bunch of fake horseshit to me
My work just implemented a hiring freeze. We have to prove ai can't do it before we are allowed to hire a real person
Does your job require technical accuracy? ChatGPT loves to shit out random answers for that stuff. "origin of the name scotch yoke" is a great example.
I bet you can prove in less than 10 minutes that AI can replace the job of the person that made that policy.
What really doesn't make sense about stuff like that is that the actual tasks AI maybe CAN do are by no means ALL that is part of a job. Unless you have AGI, you always need a human to direct/supervise/correct the AI.
Tonnes of companies are trying to replace workers with AI
And discovering its not easy at all, and produces garbage results.
Any company that attempts this usually gets punished for it.
Companies, on the other hand, that attempt to augment their workers with AI (as a tool to improve their productivity) are finding pretty good success, which results in them hiring more people, instead of firing them, because their productivity increase means the company can afford to have more workers.
I think you got that backwards. It means they can hire fewer workers to do the same job.
They can, but only a an idiot would do that.
When you hire less workers to do same work that inherently means stagnating growth, you're still producing the same output.
A smart company goes "so we get more value per worker we hire than before? We'll then we invest in hiring more workers"
The reason is because now that you can do the same work cheaper, you can sell your product/service for cheaper.
And if you can do that, your pool of prospective clients balloons.
Example: if you can do a given job in half the time/price, your pool of prospective clients more than doubles, because wealth isn't an even distribution.
So let's say if originally you could do a job for 100k in 4 months, you had maybe 100 clients who could afford you.
If now you can offer it at 50k in 2 months, you'll skyrocket to having waaaaaay more than 200 clients, you'll prolly have 500? 700? Who knows, clients.
So any sane company in these circumstances goes "oh jeez, we need to hire waaaay more workers now to handle this way higher demand for our service"
A great example of this were cab drivers.
When the motorcar replaced the horse drawn carriage, cab drivers could do the same job for cheaper and faster.
But this didnt reduce jobs, it increased them! Because way more people could afford to use a cab now, demand skyrocketed and suddenly there was a need for enormously more cab drivers.
Any company that doesn't understand this basic concept is doomed to fall behind.
What did people think AI was for?
Circa 2015. That's when I started advocating for UBI because I saw what we were doing with "AI" (it isn't really AI). We (my company) got to play and deploy early versions of these models and it was plain to see that the client interest went immediately to how they could increase efficiency and lower headcount.
AI replacing human workers was as plain to see ten years ago as the commoditization of IT was around 2005.
Bullshit jobs became increasingly prevalent as technology increased productivity.
The only thing both parties agree on is “MOAR JOBS” which makes working real sus.
It's time to get concerned about Forbes. As a journalistic standard I would've expected to read about all the jobs some of these companies created during pandy times. There's been a trend towards layoffs long before OpenAI burst onto the scene. Also everybody is going to espouse the same streamlining bullshit in their PR even if layoffs are business-driven and not so much AI's fault. A best of press releases is not good enough journalism.
It's also not critical by reporting on some of the failures of the pivots to AI that have made the rounds.
New technology displaces workers in some areas and eventually creates demand in others. For time immemorial. All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. That's why I regret having driven traffic to the Forbes website to be able to read this.
Forbes lets any asshole write for them, and the clickbait always wins. It’s basically ad-supported Medium now.
The time will say if it was good decision or bad. It's hard to say right now because the examples in the article are big corporations. Corporations are free to speculate because of their position and the fact they control large portion of the market.
The generalisation that because corporations are doing something is a very bad business advice.
You can't say company with billions of revenue and millions of customers is doing something so it's a trend. Those companies are small percentage of the number of total companies.