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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

#41
post #36

AI will not replace humans. IBM's CEOs and managers will replace humans with AI. Shareholders will force IBM to replace humans with AI. Let us stop blaming the only thing that is _not_ making any decision. Capitalism is a powerful idea that will kill the same people that vouch for it.

Managers will do every job.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#42

IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…

Keep in mind that a lot of B2B transaction use in tech is about passing responsibility and liability. Executive or director somewhere has to solve this internal problem. IBM claims they solve it and provide some degree of guarantee. You're now able to pass that problem, responsibility, and liability off by pointing to the contract and saying legal pursuit is an option. Obviously this strategy isn't great from a business perspective. If the problem is actually critical to the business function, simply having a hired scapegoat to complain and point at doesn't help you get past that problem.

If you're this massive inertial machine and the problem is to some degree artificial and a waste of internal resources but someone thinks it isn't, having someone like IBM on the hook gives credibility to the argument that they did their due diligence to solve the problem. Business at scale has a lot of childish fingerpointing. "No one ever got fired for hiring/buying IBM" as the saying goes.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#43
post #36

AI will not replace humans. IBM's CEOs and managers will replace humans with AI. Shareholders will force IBM to replace humans with AI. Let us stop blaming the only thing that is _not_ making any decision. Capitalism is a powerful idea that will kill the same people that vouch for it.

Managers will do every job.

[deleted]

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#45
post #18

I won't comment on whether this is good or even workable idea, but I will acknowledge this announcement is kinda genius. Playing into fears about AI replacing large segments of the labour force in the coming years invites calls for regulators to slow down their competition. While at the same time this announcement makes investors happy because IBM is signalling that they're looking to both cut costs and embrace AI.

This assumes that IBM is not serious about trying to replace jobs, but is trying to make a strategic 3D chess move. I'm very skeptical that this is the case.

But, let's say it is. It might play well with investors, but the idea that it's going to spur regulation or legislation to slow down AI development seems optimistic at best. That assumes a government and elected officials who are looking out for workers and not the investors who are going to be giddy about this.

In the U.S., at least, government has been actively trying to suppress wages and maintain higher levels of unemployment. Why would this spur any action to slow down AI?

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#47
>Krishna said in an interview he believes around 30% of about 26,000 non-customer-facing positions, like human resources jobs, could be replaced by AI over a five-year period—amounting to about 7,800 lost jobs. HR duties like documenting employee moves to different departments and writing employment verification letters will likely be among the first rolled over to AI, Krishna told Bloomberg. Jobs focused on interacting with customers and developing software at the 260,000-worker strong company should not be impacted in coming years, according to Krishna.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2023/05/01/ibm-...

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#48

IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…

IBM got to this point for a very basic reason - they don't pay well.

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#49

IBM as a company barely makes sense at all at this point. They are a very large and a former tech company that mostly coasts along on doing expensive consulting projects around me-too clones of things that other people have invented just so they can still pretend to be a tech company. So you can do things with AI, cloud, and databases with them. But they aren't really leaders in any of that for a long time. And havin…

You have no idea what you are talking about. IBM does more cutting edge research than the entire HN bubble combined. Hard research like materials science and semiconductors.

Consulting is less than a third of their revenue and regardless of how you feel about consulting, it seems kind of idiotic to claim that this "barely makes sense at all at this point". Are the only companies that make sense the ones that work on fad bullshit that makes the front page of HN?

Re: IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI

#50
post #45
post #18

I won't comment on whether this is good or even workable idea, but I will acknowledge this announcement is kinda genius. Playing into fears about AI replacing large segments of the labour force in the coming years invites calls for regulators to slow down their competition. While at the same time this announcement makes investors happy because IBM is signalling that they're looking to both cut costs and embrace AI.

This assumes that IBM is not serious about trying to replace jobs, but is trying to make a strategic 3D chess move. I'm very skeptical that this is the case. But, let's say it is. It might play well with investors, but the idea that it's going to spur regulation or legislation to slow down AI development seems optimistic at best. That assumes a government and elected officials who are looking out for workers and not…

I would note that IBM is like 80% middle management. At this scale, one could easily make an AI tool that generates powerpoint presentations from an email, present it to a different AI that can create an email with the bullet points that can then be read by another AI...
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