IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
finance.yahoo.com
IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
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Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#2Hah! Good luck with that.
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#3The original story from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pa...
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#4Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35780706
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#5> More mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said.
...and if some employees quit out of frustration about being managed by AI (being "moved between departments" at the whim of an AI sounds pretty spooky to me at least), even better!
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#6Its easy to make a headline by claiming AI will eventually replace people you never intended to hire anyway
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#7My experience is that there are lots of BS consulting jobs where I would wonder “what do these 10 people do?”
This included lots of offshoring companies, like IBM, that seemed more about filling out whatever the budget sheet given to them than actually making software or even any evidence of software (commits, issues, etc).
I expect that there are firms out there right now using ChatGPT to produce the facade of work so instead of messing around and billing 8 hours times 30 people every day, they just have a few people fiddling with prompts and checking in the generated text.
I actually think this might have the same impact but would hope that the value just goes back to the client in having employees do the AI work directly.
The joke was that behind every successful offshore project was one or two really busy onshore engineers manically covering and integrating work from the away team.
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#8> More mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said. ...and if some employees quit out of frustration about being managed by AI (being "moved between departments" at the whim of an AI sounds pretty spooky to me at least), even better!
It says "moving" employees which maybe implies voluntary, so "internal mobility" in other words which can create a lot of admin (business need, cost centres, levels, specs, visas etc etc). It'll perhaps be a while before the AI overlord runs the entire company and just moves us at it's whim and treats us all as Amazon Mechanical Turks[1] :)
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#9> More mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said. ...and if some employees quit out of frustration about being managed by AI (being "moved between departments" at the whim of an AI sounds pretty spooky to me at least), even better!
I took it more to mean that the paperwork involved in the move would be automated, rather than the decision to move.
Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI
#10> More mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or moving employees between departments will likely be fully automated, Krishna said. ...and if some employees quit out of frustration about being managed by AI (being "moved between departments" at the whim of an AI sounds pretty spooky to me at least), even better!
I doubt there is much of a difference between typical brainless human management, and AI management. Maybe AI is even better, that is at least likely.